The Spectator » Features » The Spectatorhttp://www.spectator.co.uk
The oldest continuously published magazine in the English language.Tue, 03 Mar 2015 18:34:21 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.3Divided we fallhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9453802/why-an-snp-surge-at-westminster-could-mean-the-end-of-britain/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9453802/why-an-snp-surge-at-westminster-could-mean-the-end-of-britain/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9453802Anyone seeking to understand the strength of the SNP should look to those parts of Scotland where the party is supposed to be weakest. At the last election, the nationalists… Read more

Listen

Anyone seeking to understand the strength of the SNP should look to those parts of Scotland where the party is supposed to be weakest. At the last election, the nationalists took just under 10 per cent of the vote in the Scottish Borders. This year, Tory canvass returns suggest the SNP may treble its share of the vote in one of the most staunchly unionist seats in Scotland.

For months, opinion polls have made unremittingly gloomy reading for unionists. The nationalists are heading for a victory on a scale still not fully comprehended in England. The polls suggest the SNP could win as many as 55 of Scotland’s 59 seats, up from six at present. No one can quite bring themselves to believe an earthquake of such magnitude is about to strike Scottish politics. Bookmakers’ odds forecast a smaller SNP landslide, but winning even 35 seats might be enough to prevent Ed Miliband from winning a majority. Without its Celtic base, Labour would struggle to govern Britain — unless a deal is cut with the nationalists.

Far from finishing the SNP, the referendum campaign has left them stronger than ever. Indeed, the SNP is no longer just a party, it is a movement — and one boasting, per capita, more than twice as many members as the three main unionist parties combined. One in every 50 adult Scots has joined the SNP since the referendum. Nicola Sturgeon’s party has more members than the British army has soldiers.

Scottish elections have rarely made much difference in Westminster. Indeed, at the last election, nothing changed north of the border: every Scottish seat returned the same result in 2010 that it had in 2005. Scotland’s election was a quiet affair, untouched by change (or enthusiasm for David Cameron). This year, in contrast, England’s election may be inconclusive while Scotland will be the scene of a political insurrection.

Neither Cameron nor Miliband are in any position to shape the outcome of the election in Scotland. Each is curiously powerless. They sit in London, anxiously awaiting the news from the north that may determine their fate. The SNP, which has been polling at more than 40 per cent for four months, holds a significant structural advantage. Unlike its rivals, it has a cause which motivates an army of supporters — and a cause is a fiercely powerful thing. Stronger, certainly, than anything offered by a weak and divided unionism. Who else, the SNP says, can be trusted to put Scotland’s interest first?

The unionists try to pretend this isn’t happening. In Edinburgh last week, David Cameron claimed the constitutional question has been ‘settled’. No one in Scotland recognises it as settled, however, and if the Prime Minister thinks it is he is deluding himself. Unionism’s complacency remains a problem second only to unionism’s inability to recognise that it has a problem.

Every device intended to kill Scottish nationalism has ended up making it stronger. Devolution succeeded in killing Toryism north of the border, but only at the expense of fertilising nationalism. Labour’s hegemony in Scotland needed an opposition and the SNP was happy to fill that void. The independence referendum made the idea of secession seem a plausible reality. An alternative future was glimpsed and sold with commendable, if heroic, optimism. In the circumstances, it was little surprise that 45 per cent of Scots thought it a risk worth pursuing. In the long-term, this bodes ill for unionism and, if nothing else, the SNP is adept at playing the long game. It need only win once; unionism cannot afford a single defeat.

So, far from the Scotland issue being settled, it looms larger than ever. In terms of domestic politics, it is the greatest challenge to the authority and confidence of the British state since 1918, when Sinn Fein won a landslide victory in what, in the end, became the Irish Republic. For obvious reasons, the SNP dislikes comparisons with Sinn Fein. Nevertheless, its aim — the dismemberment of the British state — is the same. And this, in turn, makes Ed Miliband’s reluctance to rule out a post-election deal with the nationalists utterly baffling. The SNP likes the idea of being kingmakers but its true aim is to be wreckers. If Miliband genuinely wants Britain to stay together, why even consider joining forces with a party whose central aim is to tear Britain apart?

The idea of a weak and limping Miliband government dependent upon Alex Salmond’s support — albeit on a confidence and supply basis — is a useful second prize for the SNP. But the gold medal-winning result is another Conservative-led government lacking ‘democratic legitimacy’ north of the Tweed and Solway.

A second term for Cameron will add weight to the SNP’s claim that Scotland and England are such diverging polities that it makes less and less sense for them to be part of the same political union. The SNP’s agenda is to sue for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

Here we may perceive a difference between the SNP leadership and its newly swollen membership. The lion’s share of SNP voters (and, for that matter, Scots) prefer the idea of an SNP-dependent Labour government. In other words, the Tory argument ‘Vote SNP, get Labour’ encourages Scots to vote for their preferred outcome. This is worse than a dubious political strategy for the Conservatives to pursue — it is a reckless one.

Then again, Labour’s ‘Vote SNP, get the Tories’ warning is little better. It is intended to revive Labour’s vote in its besieged west of Scotland heartland, inviting Labour defectors to remember how much they hate the Tories. But this rendition of an old tune — one trotted out at every election for decades — shows little sign of persuading Labour-supporting ‘yes’ voters to return to their ancestral fold. According to one recent poll, just 8 per cent of ‘Yes’ voters plan to endorse Labour candidates in May.

And why would they return? What’s to return to? Jim Murphy, Scottish Labour’s new leader, claims a vote for Labour is a ‘patriotic’ vote but this, like so much else in Scottish politics, merely reminds voters that Scotland’s political weather is made by the SNP. Murphy appreciates that Scottish Labour must be more than just London Labour’s northern branch office, but almost all of Scottish Labour’s brightest and best — a relative term — are in London, not Edinburgh. Even Murphy only became leader in Scotland because he’d been passed over by Miliband in London.

The referendum campaign necessarily divided Scots along the line of the national question; the future of the country is plainly a greater issue than any differences over the NHS, education or even economic policy. This being so, no one should be surprised by the nationalist surge. The logic is chiselled from granite: if you voted ‘yes’ in September, why would you vote for a unionist party in May?

Moreover, if the election contest is framed as a battle to secure greater powers for the Scottish parliament (or ‘For Scotland’, to adopt the SNP’s shorthand) then voting SNP is the surest, perhaps only, way of ensuring the Scottish Question remains high on Westminster’s agenda. Even Labour voters accept that the SNP is best-placed to secure more powers for the Scottish parliament. Given that the nationalists may well become the third biggest force in a hung parliament, there will be ample scope for mischief.

If this infuriates English voters, so much the better. Alex Salmond will, in effect, be dispatched south of the border as Nicola Sturgeon’s ambassador to London’s television studios. His role is to run a guerrilla campaign, fomenting discord and division. Resisting his provocations will not be easy, not least because so few English Tories, whose arrogance is matched only by their ignorance, are aware that Labour is merely the opposition, whereas the SNP is the enemy.

The Scottish Tories see matters more clearly. In Edinburgh and Glasgow and Aberdeen, cities where the SNP is challenging Labour, there is considerable anecdotal evidence supporting the suspicion that many Tories are prepared to vote Labour, the better to thwart the nationalist advance. They would rather risk a Labour government than an SNP landslide that might put Cameron back in Downing Street. A Miliband administration is a misery that need merely be endured for five years. A nationalist victory, by contrast, risks a second independence referendum which might break the Union forever.

To the SNP, the next general election is just a staging post. Winning a majority of Scottish seats would be an excellent start, but influencing the governance of the UK is of relatively minor importance. Any deal with Labour — or even a stage-managed week of negotiations — will be conducted with the 2016 Holyrood elections in mind. An SNP majority next year would bring the power to call for a second referendum. And if a majority of Scottish voters call for one, through an SNP (and Green) vote, how can Westminster reasonably say no? This is why so many Scottish unionists will vote tactically in May: it is crucial that the nationalists’ momentum is checked now.

Then comes Europe. Should Cameron lose the election less badly than Miliband and earn a second term, he is committed to a referendum on EU membership. While Scots are more Eurosceptic than the SNP allows (a third say they would vote to leave), the English are still far more likely to vote to leave the EU. If they do, and Scotland votes to stay in, the thirst for independence might prove unquenchable. (Equally, how would England react if Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish votes determined the outcome of the EU referendum?) Cameron’s European difficulties are another opportunity for the nationalists. And a reminder that the Union can be lost in London as well as in Scotland.

It is depressing that so many English Tories are plainly more exercised by ‘threats’ from Brussels than from Edinburgh. As one Cabinet member puts it: ‘Scotland really is, now, another country: I’ve given up understanding it.’ Many have given up caring, too. It is clear that a good proportion of English Tories would accept a notional bargain in which Scottish independence was the price of levering the rump UK out of the EU. That leaves Scottish unionists, especially right-of-centre unionists, as the forlorn last-believers in a faith long since abandoned by everyone else — including those they mistakenly reckoned as their co-religionists.

Scottish votes could well determine the outcome of this general election, but the matter of Scotland — that is to say, the battle of Britain — will not be resolved this May. This is just a preliminary skirmish for the other, larger, battles that lie ahead. David Cameron would be wrong to think that his mission in May is to sneak over the finish line: his fight will have just begun. So unionists are entitled to feel a deep and heavy sense of foreboding. This election is going to be a disaster.

The era of stable governments is over

Join us on 23 March for a Spectator discussion on whether the era of stable government is over with Matthew Parris, James Forsyth, Jeremy Browne MP, Vernon Bogdanor and Matthew Goodwin. The event will be chaired by Andrew Neil. In association with Seven Investment Management. For tickets and further information click here.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9453802/why-an-snp-surge-at-westminster-could-mean-the-end-of-britain/feed/1037plfeaturedStand up for ex-Muslimshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9453112/how-liberal-britain-is-betraying-ex-muslims/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9453112/how-liberal-britain-is-betraying-ex-muslims/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9453112A few days ago Imtiaz, a solar engineer; Aliya, a campaigner for secular education; Sohail, a gay Somali in his twenties; and Sara, a bright student, went to Queen Mary… Read more

]]>A few days ago Imtiaz, a solar engineer; Aliya, a campaigner for secular education; Sohail, a gay Somali in his twenties; and Sara, a bright student, went to Queen Mary University of London in the East End and made an astonishingly brave stand.

Astonishing because they volunteered to step forward to the front line after the Islamist murders of satirists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen. Before an audience and in front of cameras, they explained why they had left Islam. They had become ‘apostates’, to use a dangerous word, which blackens what ought to be a personal decision that free adults in free countries ought to be free to make without anyone threatening them. In the mouths of theocrats, ‘apostasy’ turns individual rights to freedom of conscience into a sin and a betrayal.

The ex-Muslims knew all about the costs of challenging the taboos of their families. Sara was sparkling and funny, but her voice cracked when she described how her parents ‘chose religion over me’, and how the last words she remembered her sister saying were to wish that she were dead.

Any child who breaks away from a devoutly or fanatically religious background or a sectarian or political cult faces the same pain. Your parents hate you for rejecting their dogmas. Shame at your treacherous rejection of your tribe and its taboos supplants love, and you become an outcast.

But there is something else with Islam. Most ex-Muslims are in the closet because they live with the fear of violence. If you want to go to one of their meetings, they will vet you first to see if you are a spy who will denounce them to their violent enemies. This in London, the supposedly cosmopolitan capital of a democratic country, with a Human Rights Act that supposedly guarantees religious freedom.

Except that in practice Britain does no such thing. The religious have the freedom to proselytise and seek converts, and to insist that their remarkably tender feelings be treated with ‘respect’. But the converse does not apply. If ex-Muslims denounce religious bigotry, they put themselves in danger.

The young people at Queen Mary’s sent tingles down my spine because they had decided to fight back. ‘I’d had enough of talking to people in secret,’ Imtiaz told me. ‘I want to help others who are going through what I went through when I came out by telling my story openly.’

As always with religion, you can find divine authority for both the tolerant and the tyrannical. Liberal Muslims ought to be able to point to the Qur’an (Chapter 2 verse 256 ) which states: ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’ Unfortunately for them the hadiths — purported sayings of Mohammed collected by Sahih Bukhari in the 9th century — state equally clearly: ‘Whoever changes his religion, kill him.’

Across the Muslim world today the tyrannical are triumphing over the tolerant. It is not just the Islamic State, Iran and other enemies of the West who punish apostasy with death, but the West’s ‘allies’ in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Unsurprisingly in an interconnected world, the foul belief that you can punish men and women for following their consciences flourishes in Britain too.

Last year Britain’s Council of ex-Muslims produced a report on the publicly quoted opinions of the leading figures in the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IEra). Do not let its numbingly bureaucratic name fool you. One minute a supporter called Ifthekar Jaman was distributing Islamist propaganda in Portsmouth while dressed in an IEra-supplied T-shirt. The next he was fighting and eventually dying for Isis in Iraq. Its leaders peddle all the usual prejudices about gays, women and Jews. And alongside those enemies stand apostates. Hamza Tzortzis, a founder and leading speaker of IEra, was asked whether Islam condones a death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy.

‘Yes it does, yes,’ he replied, before going on to opine that beheading would be a painless means of killing ex-Muslims.

Other speakers have said that Muslims have no choice but to accept sharia law and its lethal punishments, whether they believed or not. There are many other groups and individuals who think the same, though few admit their dark thoughts with the same brazenness. Apostasy to this mentality covers not only ex-Muslims but liberal Muslims too. A mob whipped up in part on Twitter by the slippery figure of Mo Ansar accused Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation of being a blasphemer and traitor because he said he found a harmless image of Mohammed harmless. The fight to defend ex-Muslims therefore is a fight to defend all Muslims who reject extremism.

But can you see British society joining it? Simon Cottee, the author of an excellent new study The Apostates (published by Hurst & Co next month) shows how elements in the left and academia are happy to denounce Muslims who exercise their freedom to abandon their religion as ‘native informers’ who have gone over to the side of western imperialism. As for the liberal mainstream, you only have to listen to all the cowardly voices who say the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo had ‘provoked’ their own murder, or that the Jews of Paris and Copenhagen had it coming because of Israel, to know how they would duck out of a confrontation.

If you search YouTube for ‘ex-Muslim voices’, you will see that the speakers at Queen Mary’s were pleasant, articulate and ironic people. Not so different from you and me. But listen to what they have to say and you will understand that they are better and braver than almost everyone you meet. They are prepared to fight for the liberal values we have forgotten how to cherish, let alone defend.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9453112/how-liberal-britain-is-betraying-ex-muslims/feed/204BRITAIN-FRANCE-ATTACKS-CHARLIE-HEBDOfeaturedThe war on rural Englandhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452952/the-myth-of-the-housing-crisis/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452952/the-myth-of-the-housing-crisis/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9452952There is no such thing as the English countryside. There is my countryside, your countryside and everyone else’s. Most people fight just for theirs. When David Cameron told the BBC’s… Read more

Listen

There is no such thing as the English countryside. There is my countryside, your countryside and everyone else’s. Most people fight just for theirs. When David Cameron told the BBC’s Countryfile he would defend the countryside ‘as I would my own family’, many of its defenders wondered which one he meant. In the past five years a national asset that public opinion ranks with the royal family, Shakespeare and the NHS, has slid into trench warfare. Parish churches fill with protest groups. Websites seethe with fury. Planning lawyers have never been busier. The culprit has been planning reform.

My files burst with reports from the front, each local but collectively a systematic assault on the appearance of rural England. In Gloucestershire, Berkeley Castle gazes across the vale of the Severn to the Cotswolds as it has since the middle ages. It is now to face fields of executive homes. Thamesside Cookham is to be flooded not by the river but by 3,750 houses. The walls of Warwick Castle are to look out over 900 houses. The ancient town of Sherborne must take 800.

So-called ‘volume estates’ — hundreds of uniform properties rather than piecemeal growth — are to suburbanise towns and villages such as Tewkesbury, Tetbury, Malmesbury, Thaxted, Newmarket, Great Coxwell, Uffington, Kemble, Penshurst, Hook Norton, Stow-on-the-Wold, Mevagissey, Formby. Every village in Oxfordshire has been told to add a third more buildings. Needless to say there is no local option.

Developer lobbyists and coalition ministers jeer at those who defend what they regard as ‘chocolate-box England’. But did Cameron mean so radically to change the character of the English village and country town? These are not just chocolate boxes. The list embraces the country round Durham, Gateshead, Rotherham, Salford, Redditch, Lincoln and Sandbach. Such building will ‘hollow out’ town centres. Three-quarters of hypermarket approvals are now out of town, even as this market collapses. The green belt is near meaningless. The Campaign to Protect Rural England estimates some 80,000 units are now proposed for greenbelt land.

The coalition’s planning policy was drafted in 2011 by Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles’s ‘practitioner advisory group’. This group is a builders’ ramp, composed of Taylor Wimpey and others. Councils were told that either they could plan for more building or it would proceed anyway. Brownfield preference was ended. Journey-to-work times were disregarded. Fields could sprout unregulated billboards. ‘Sustainable’ development was defined as economic, then profitable.

The draft proved so bad it had to be amended. But the disregard of local wishes and bias against rural conservation remained. As with siting of wind and solar installations, the centre knew best. Whereas 80 per cent of new building before 2010 had been on serviced land within settlements, this has now shrunk to half.

The most successful tactic of the rural developers was the hijacking of ‘the housing crisis’. They claimed the crisis could only be ended by building in open country, even when their wish was for ‘executive homes’. This ideal of land lying enticingly ‘free’ for homeless people acquired the moral potency of the NHS.

Housing makes politicians go soft in the head. An old Whitehall saw holds that England ‘needs’ 250,000 new houses a year, because that is how many households are ‘formed’. The figure, a hangover from wartime predict-and-provide, takes no account of occupancy rates, geography of demand, migration or housing subsidy, let alone price. Everyone thinks they ‘need’ a better house.

Yet this figure has come to drive a thousand bulldozers and give macho force to ideologues of left and right, whose ‘own’ countryside is somewhere in France or Italy. Few Britons are homeless. Most enjoy living space of which the Japanese can only dream. Yet the Economist magazine cites the 250,000 figure at every turn. The Institute of Economic Affairs wails that housing has become ‘unaffordable for young people’. A recent FT article declared, ‘The solution to the housing crisis lies in the green belt.’

This is all nonsense. The chief determinant of house prices is wealth, subsidy and the supply of money. During the credit boom, prices soared in America and Australia, where supply was unconstrained. Less than 10 per cent of Britain’s housing market is in new building. Although clearly it is a good thing if more houses are available, there is no historical correlation between new builds and price.

Neil Monnery’s Safe as Houses is one of the few sane books on housing economics. It points out that German house prices have actually fallen over half a century of steady economic boom. The reason is that just 43 per cent of Germans own their own homes, and rarely do so under the age of 40. The British figure hovers between 60 and 80 per cent. Germans are content to rent, a more efficient way of allocating living space. They invest their life savings elsewhere, much to the benefit of their economy.

The curse of British housing, as another economist, Danny Dorling, has written, is not under-supply but under-occupancy. In half a century, Britons have gone from ‘needing’ 1.5 rooms each to needing 2.5 rooms each. This is partly caused by tax inducements to use houses as pension funds, partly by low property taxes and high stamp duty on transfers. Britain, Dorling says, has plenty of houses. It just uses them inefficiently, though high prices are now at last shifting the market back to renting.

London’s housing has been ‘in crisis’ for as long as I can remember. Yet its under-occupancy is remarkable. Famously its annual growth could fit into the borough of Ealing if it was developed at the density of inner Paris. The agents Stirling Ackroyd have identified space in the capital for 500,000 new houses without encroaching on its green belt. The reality is that housing ‘need’ (that is, demand) is never met in booming cities, only in declining ones.

This has nothing to do with building in the countryside. Past policies aimed at ‘out-of-town’ new towns and garden cities merely depopulated cities and duplicated infrastructure. Central Liverpool and Manchester (like Shoreditch) numbered their voters in hundreds rather than tens of thousands. A rare architect wise to these things, Lord Rogers, recently wrote that this led to ‘new town blues, lifeless dormitories, hollowed-out towns and unnecessary encroachment on green sites’. Sprawl was about profit, not planning.

The answer to housing a rising population has to lie in towns and cities, in reducing the pressure on commuting and raising the efficiency of infrastructure. Cities are where people and jobs are, and where services can be efficiently supplied. England’s urban population per acre is low by world standards, half that of New York or Paris, yet even so its housing occupancy is low. A boost to urban densities — not just empty towers along the Thames — is a sensible ‘green’ policy.

England’s countryside will clearly change over time. Its occupants no longer farm it, and are more often retired or commuters. Yet its amenity is clearly loved by the mass of people who visit, enjoy, walk and play in it. Its beauty in all weathers remains a delight of living and moving about in this country. England made a mess of its cities after the war. The rural landscape is its finest environmental asset.

Any civilised society regulates the market in scarce resources, including those of beauty. It guards old paintings, fine buildings, picturesque villages, mountains and coasts. England is the most crowded of Europe’s big countries, yet a past genius for policing the boundary between town and country has kept 80 per cent of its surface area still visually rural in character. This has been crucially assisted by the 14 urban green belts created in the 1950s by a Conservative, Duncan Sandys.

I am sure the way forward is to treat the countryside as we do urban land. It should be listed and conserved for its scenic value — as it is for its quality as farmland. I would guess this would render sacrosanct a ‘grade one’ list of roughly three quarters of rural England, to be built on only in extremity. The remaining grades would enjoy the protection of a ‘presumption against development’, but a protection that would dwindle down the grades to ‘of limited local value’.

One feature of such listing is that green belts could be redefined. Those of minimal amenity value would be released in favour of belt extension elsewhere. It is stupid to guard a muddy suburban field while building over the flanks of the Pennines.

In making these judgments we need to rediscover the language of landscape beauty, fashioned by the sadly deceased Oliver Rackham and others. Without such language, argument is debased and money rules. The policy of ‘let rip’, adopted by both major parties at present, means that England’s countryside is having to fight for each wood and field alone. At which point I say, praise be for nimbys.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452952/the-myth-of-the-housing-crisis/feed/70jenkinsfeaturedThe American traditionhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452282/americas-greatest-tradition-inventing-spurious-traditions/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452282/americas-greatest-tradition-inventing-spurious-traditions/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9452282 Fredericksburg, Virginia Americans crave traditions. The older they are the more we cherish them. Thanksgiving, which beats out Christmas, was invented by Abe Lincoln in 1863 but it is… Read more

Americans crave traditions. The older they are the more we cherish them. Thanksgiving, which beats out Christmas, was invented by Abe Lincoln in 1863 but it is an outgrowth of the timeless harvest festival celebrated by the generations of mankind that formed the earliest agricultural communities. Much harder is inventing traditions from something new. In this we are unsurpassed. Take the president’s annual State of the Union address to congress. Ever since Thomas Jefferson’s time, a clerk from the House of Representatives read it in a rapid drone and then left. But in 1917, facing entry into Europe’s first world war, President Woodrow Wilson decided to deliver the address in person. Since then the speech has always been delivered by the president himself, in keeping with tradition.

From then on it was open season on any and every tradition we could invent. A Supreme Court clerk used to hold the Bible at Inauguration; now the first lady does. The president used to wear morning coat and top hat on this day, until 1953 when Eisenhower wore a business suit. In 1961 JFK revived the morning coat and top hat; Johnson and Nixon broke with the new old tradition and wore business suits in keeping with the old new tradition.

Nobody had any doubt what Jimmy Carter would wear, so at his inauguration in 1977 he started the tradition of getting out of the limousine and walking part of the way to the White House. After that they all started getting out and walking (and holding hands with the first lady), including Reagan, who honoured both the new former tradition and the former old tradition in a modified version of morning dress: striped trousers, black suit jacket, soft shirt, and four-in-hand tie. He looked like a man in a mismatched suit.

Very soon thereafter, a plane crashed into the icy Potomac river and a man named Lenny Skutnik who had been walking across the bridge dived in and saved some passengers. The State of the Union address was coming up, so Reagan invited Skutnik to sit in the VIP gallery and introduced him as an ‘American hero’.

That did it. Since then every president has stocked the gallery with heroes of one kind or another — whole groups of them. Any president who doesn’t get his heroes up there can count on being a one-termer, if not impeached.

Reagan did the most for neo-traditions. In the 1930s FDR made regular evening radio addresses called ‘fireside chats’ that held the whole country in thrall. Reagan knew better than to interrupt primetime television, so he gave Saturday morning radio chats. Another instant tradition took root. Since then, every president goes on the radio on Saturday mornings and they always will.

The helicopter salute is Reagan’s most noticeable contribution to tradition-building, as well as the riskiest, which is why everybody watches it to see what happens. The helicopter bringing the president back to the White House from the airport lands in the back yard. A marine in dress blues stands beside the door and salutes as the president gets off and walks down the short flight of steps.

Tradition reared its head when Reagan returned the marine’s salute. I don’t think George H.W. Bush or Clinton did it every time, but George W. made the salute his own and did it religiously. Now Obama is doing it, but matter-of-factly, almost like an afterthought, so that recently he forgot that he had a Big Gulp cup in his right hand and nearly poured its contents over his own head — or worse, over the marine.

If we wanted to get a tradition out of this we already had one: military etiquette says that an officer in civilian clothes does not return a salute, but Reagan did, so no president will ever risk not doing it. The neo–tradition is ours to keep, helped along by the suspense that one day, some president will poke himself in the eye or lose his balance and break his saluting arm in the fall. Bets are being made on how long the marine will hold his salute.

We are so starved for traditions that we can find them in the unlikeliest places. To America’s neo-traditionalists, just sounding traditional is enough, like the lingerie company Victoria’s Secret. The neo-traditionalist thinks that wearing these seductive unmentionables renders her charms timeless. A traditional traditionalist knows better, which is why I shop at Boudicea’s Retreat.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452282/americas-greatest-tradition-inventing-spurious-traditions/feed/50US-POLITICS-OBAMAfeaturedFeel the burnhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452132/my-new-wood-burning-stove-is-expensive-trendy-and-miserable/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452132/my-new-wood-burning-stove-is-expensive-trendy-and-miserable/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 00:30:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9452132One of my earliest memories is seeing my father in the early morning raking out the ashes of our coal fire. I was interested in the blue veins around his… Read more

]]>One of my earliest memories is seeing my father in the early morning raking out the ashes of our coal fire. I was interested in the blue veins around his ankles and bare white heels as he strained forwards with his short shovel. After the ashes he carefully placed balls of newspaper, which he called ‘spills’, and built a tent of small kindling logs over them. I was careful not to speak as he was always in a furious temper while he was doing it. Fifty years on, I have discovered why.

I recently moved house and inherited from the previous owner a wood-burning stove, which takes up a large amount of space in my small living room, and a lot of time and energy from me. According to Radio 4, wood-burning stoves are now a mark of worldly success, having overtaken the Aga as a status symbol for the middle classes. Arbiters of taste such as Lily Allen and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall rave about them, so I was lucky, I felt at first, to find one already installed. New they cost £2,000 or more, and 180,000 UK homes had a stove installed last year; sales were five times higher than in 2007. People are obviously desperate to go back in time.

It bothers me that since I moved in with this stove I am often cold, sometimes wet, tired and frequently covered in ash. My cat does not sit happily in front of it, yellow eyes gleaming, as she might before a real open fire. She is wise enough to stay in the bedroom submerged in the winter duvet.

I may have stumbled, thanks to the wood-burner, upon a major difference between the sexes: men are happy to forage for their fuel but most women are not. The friends who say they really love a good wood-burner are usually men. They enjoy discussing how to manage them, keep the fire going by using petrol-laced fire-lighters, pushing a lever to the right and releasing a valve at a particular moment. They seem primordially fascinated by pyrotechnics and see controlling fire as a real skill.

Perhaps my problem is that I live alone, and wood-burners are a two-person job; one to make the tea and rabbit stew, while the other goes out to get the wood every few hours. I used to enjoy westerns and tales of frontier life, fancying myself dressed in skins and snow-shoes, but as I get older I find I am not really a backwoods type. I don’t relish going out in the night when the fire starts going out unexpectedly — which it often does, as small logs burn too quickly while big logs refuse to light at all. I wish I had watched just how my father made his spills instead of looking at his feet. If I am tired I just let the thing go out and put on a jumper.

It’s not pleasant squatting down in the dark and wet, trying to find wood dry enough to burn, but neither is buying fuel any fun. If you get wood or smokeless coal delivered, it comes in very large amounts which will half-fill your living room or kitchen, so you have to take the car and drive off to find sacks of the right size. Like many women I do not like driving on motorways into industrial estates to find wholesalers. The first bag I bought was dry on top but mouldy and damp further down. A local workman suggested a different outlet where they sell smokeless coal, as it’s easier to manage and cheaper. I set off again, to find the place in a distant, decaying 1960s shopping arcade.

‘We ain’t got none. It’s not the season,’ an assistant told me as freezing rain lashed the roof. I suggested that winter might be a good time for mixed-fuel-burning stoves. She looked puzzled.

‘We only sell fuel for barbecues,’ she said. ‘If there’s any left it’ll be over there, in health and beauty.’ I couldn’t follow her logic. Even the most avid stove-fanciers don’t claim that owning one adds to your good looks. In my case it makes me look like a hermit with red eyes and a wheezy cough. I was relieved to find there was no coal among the false eyelashes and panty pads because I realised, rather late, that I couldn’t have carried it to the car, which was parked on a pavement somewhere round the back.

Instead I went yet further away to a better-known household store and bought four piles of expensive ‘high heat’ wood and lumbered that into my car boot. I never found out whether it gave a ‘high heat’ or not because back at home it refused to light.

A Spanish shop assistant later told me that at home they always use Doritos to get the fire going. Perhaps I’ll try them, or perhaps I’ll just join the cat under the duvet and eat the Doritos instead.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9452132/my-new-wood-burning-stove-is-expensive-trendy-and-miserable/feed/75GettyImages_507952735featuredMy dad saved the poundhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9451512/zac-goldsmith-how-my-dad-saved-britain/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9451512/zac-goldsmith-how-my-dad-saved-britain/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9451512In recent weeks Ed Balls has been offering a new reason to vote Labour: it was his party, he says, that saved Britain from joining the euro. Now, the shadow… Read more

]]>In recent weeks Ed Balls has been offering a new reason to vote Labour: it was his party, he says, that saved Britain from joining the euro. Now, the shadow chancellor is free to say what he wants — and in a way, I’m pleased that he feels the need to convey such an impression. But the true story of how Britain was saved from the euro is somewhat different.

It all happened nearly a generation ago, between 1995 and 1997, when I was in my very early twenties. It was my father, James Goldsmith, who set out to ensure that Britain would never join the euro without the consent of the people. He dedicated the last years of his life to the cause. My mother campaigned in his constituency for 12 hours every day. He gave it all he had: he was battling terminal pancreatic cancer and died in July 1997, just weeks after the general election.

James Goldsmith formed the Referendum party in 1995 and called for a full referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. In doing so, he unleashed a chain of events that led inexorably and inevitably to a public veto on joining the single currency.

It started with an interview on the BBC’s Breakfast with Frost. He pledged that he would fully fund a candidate in every constituency in Britain to fight the 1997 general election on a single policy: the right of the British people to decide their future in Europe. No political party was willing to offer a referendum — he wanted to put that right.

To my father, the euro was obviously the most immediate threat from the EU, but it was not the only one. He was appalled that EU law could override our sovereign parliament, and by the bureaucratic assault on ancient English civil liberties such as habeas corpus. He was dismayed by the destruction of British agriculture and traditional fishing communities. Above all, he rejected the idea that an unelected elite in Brussels should rule Britain while being answerable to nobody.

At the end of 1995 the Referendum party announced that it would field 547 candidates in the next election — fighting four out of five constituencies. The volunteers were men and women from all walks of life and shades of political opinion whom my father dubbed the ‘rabble army’. He launched a massive political campaign that was (and remains to this day) unique in British political history. It placed double-page advertising in all national newspapers, and issued five million videos and 46 million copies of a special newspaper — one for each household in Britain. There were 60 political agents training candidates out of ten regional offices, more than 300,000 fully audited members, and more than 300 public meetings throughout Britain. The campaign culminated in a rally of 9,500 people at Alexandra Palace.

An intensive public education campaign followed. According to internal Gallup polls, half the country was Euro-sceptic — and one in six Conservative voters was intending to vote for the Referendum party. This focused Tory minds. On 17 April 1996, Sir John Major announced that the Conservatives would go into the election promising not to join the single currency without consulting the British people.

I don’t think anyone believes this announcement was motivated by personal conviction. Sir John’s objective was to spike the guns of the Referendum party. For good measure, he also quietly offered my father a peerage. I am glad he did — the offer made my father laugh so much that, I like to believe, it may have prolonged his life by a few weeks.

The Referendum party had given the public a way of saying clearly that a general election victory did not mean permission to abolish the pound. Tony Blair grudgingly accepted this, which is why Labour’s 1997 manifesto said that if the pound was to be scrapped, ‘The people would have to say “yes” in a referendum.’ Blair wanted to ensure that the whole issue of Europe was pushed under the carpet and wouldn’t get in the way of a Labour victory.

Eighteen years after these events, which were so formative in my life, the true importance of what was achieved by the Referendum party ought to be more widely acknowledged. The pledge extracted from mainstream political parties by the ‘rabble army’ has ensured that Britain is safe from the disaster still unfolding on the continent. Nobody but the rabble army may lay claim to that achievement. Sorry Ed Balls — keeping Britain out of the euro calamity is my father’s legacy, not yours.

The era of stable government is over

Join us on 23 March for a Spectator discussion on whether the era of stable government is over with Matthew Parris, James Forsyth, Jeremy Browne MP, Vernon Bogdanor and Matthew Goodwin. The event will be chaired by Andrew Neil. In association with Seven Investment Management. For tickets and further information click here.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9451512/zac-goldsmith-how-my-dad-saved-britain/feed/36Sir James GoldsmithfeaturedThe Turquoise Coasthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9453892/a-cruise-around-cleopatras-wedding-present/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9453892/a-cruise-around-cleopatras-wedding-present/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 00:30:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9453892Legend has it that Mark Antony considered Turkey’s Turquoise Coast so beautiful that, in about 32 bc, he gave it to Cleopatra as a wedding present. The country’s southernmost shore… Read more

]]>Legend has it that Mark Antony considered Turkey’s Turquoise Coast so beautiful that, in about 32 bc, he gave it to Cleopatra as a wedding present. The country’s southernmost shore stretches for nearly a thousand miles and combined incredible scenery, clear azure waters and a warm Mediterranean climate. Its strategic location means it has been occupied by various empires over the course of its history, including the Lycians and Ottomans.

Two thousand years on, it is still breathtaking. The Taurus mountains provide a dramatic backdrop to the ancient ruins and beautiful beaches. With no road access to many of these hidden gems, the best way to explore them is by boat, preferably a wooden gulet. Many of these traditional fishing boats have in recent years been turned into chartered holiday cruise vessels.

We sailed across the Aegean Sea on the appropriately named Carpe Diem 1. The captain altered his itinerary depending on what we wanted to see, which gave us the freedom to explore in our own time an area that has remained largely untouched by mass tourism.

We boarded the gulet in Sarsala Bay, a short drive from Dalaman airport. Among the places where we dropped anchor was Hamam Bay, where we looked round the remains of a Roman baths built for Cleopatra. To get to the site — much of which is submerged beneath the sea — we walked along a footpath alongside pine forests, and then snorkelled to see the underwater ruins. The area is wonderful for diving and swimming.

Our boat’s 550-square metre sails were unfurled for our trip across to Ekincik Bay, near Marmaris, to visit the secluded beach and caves. With the engines switched off, and a gentle warm breeze blowing, it was quiet and peaceful. We had a similar experience standing on the deck one day at dawn to watch the sun rise over the mountains. The gulet was the only vessel around.

The reed-lined Dalyan river was too narrow for our boat, so we boarded a smaller one for a trip to the ancient ruins of Kaunos, a former sea port dating from the 9th century bc. Among the remains was a 5,000-seater Roman amphitheatre and baths. Thousands of people once lived there, but the town was abandoned in the Middle Ages due to malaria, and the city’s nobility were buried in impressive Hellenistic-style tombs cut into the side of a nearby cliff. The region is fertile, with trees laden with lemons, pomegranates and apricots, while the river teems with fish as well as sea turtles, which breed on the nearby Isuzu Beach.

On another trip, to the small town of Dalyan, we slathered ourselves in mud at the baths. Rumour has it that the clay can cure all manner of ailments. After a shower to wash it off, we returned to our gulet and moored in a tiny cove, where we spent the evening gazing at the beautiful landscape as it slowly faded into the sky.

Listen

Last month, the speaker of the Russian parliament solemnly instructed his foreign affairs committee to launch a historical investigation: was West Germany’s ‘annexation’ of East Germany really legal? Should it be condemned? Ought it to be reversed? Last week, the Russian foreign minister, speaking at a security conference in Munich, hinted that he might have similar doubts. ‘Germany’s reunification was conducted without any referendum,’ he declared, ominously.

At this, the normally staid audience burst out laughing. The Germans in the room found the Russian statements particularly hilarious. Undo German unification? Why, that would require undoing the whole post-Cold War settlement!

Which is indeed a very amusing notion — unless you think that this is exactly what the Russian speaker, the Russian foreign minister, and indeed the Russian President, a man who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’, are in fact trying to achieve.

I concede that this plan does sound preposterous. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old Soviet empire is no more. Most of the old Warsaw Pact countries have joined the European Union and Nato. Central Europe’s transition from communism to democracy has been widely acclaimed as a huge success, and indeed is widely copied and studied the world over. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, even Romania and Bulgaria are all more open and generally more prosperous than ever before. Germany is triumphantly unified, and Europe is whole and free.

Can Vladimir Putin really pick all of this apart? Well, while most of us weren’t watching, he has certainly tried. We’ve spent the past decade arguing about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, almost anything but Russia. Meanwhile, Russia has been pursuing a grand strategy designed to delegitimise Nato, undermine the EU, split the western alliance and, above all, reverse the transitions of the 1990s.

Much of the time, they are pushing on an open door. The Kremlin doesn’t invent anti-European or anti-establishment ideas, it simply supports them in whatever form they exist, customising their tactics to suit each country. They’ll support the far left or the far right — in Greece they support both. Despite its economic plight, the new Greek government’s first act was not a protest against European economic policy but a protest against sanctions on Russia. Only then did it tell its European creditors that it might not pay them back.

If need be, Russia will court select members of the political and financial establishment too. In Britain, Russia has friends in the City, but also sponsors RT, the propaganda channel which features George Galloway and other titans of the loony left. In France, Russia keeps in close touch with industrialists, but a Russian-Czech bank has loaned Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front €9 million, with another €30 million said to be on the way.

Still, Britain and France are established democracies, each with a relatively strong political class and relatively solvent news-papers, and Greece is a longstanding member of the EU. With very little effort, the Kremlin can achieve a lot more in smaller countries where the political class is impoverished, the media downright broke and Europe still a new idea. On a recent visit to Prague, I was surprised to hear so much Russian spoken in the streets, and said so to a friend. He rolled his eyes: ‘Prague has become the poor man’s London.’ Russians who can’t afford Mayfair buy flats in the Baroque city centre. While there, they’ve discovered that the price of manipulating Czech politics is strikingly low.

Here again, they didn’t invent the Czech backlash against transition. Not everyone has got what they wanted in the past 25 years; the dissatisfied young don’t remember the bad old days. The Iraq war created disillusion with the transatlantic alliance, and the financial crash of 2009 created scepticism of the ‘West European model’ that the Czechs used to admire. Since 2013, when the Czech government collapsed following a bribery scandal, the Czech internet has heaved with invective and insult, attacks on ‘our corrupt political class’ and ‘two wasted decades’. In this atmosphere, a tiny bit of Russian media funding, especially in a country where most newspapers lose money, goes a long way. One former minister told me that the same Czech internet portals which attacked him — he says falsely — for corruption are now attacking Ukraine and supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

A little bit of money goes a long way in Czech politics too. The election campaign of the current president, Milos Zeman, was openly financed in 2013 by Lukoil, the Russian energy company. Since then President Zeman — who doesn’t, fortunately, control the government — has argued vociferously against Russian sanctions, dismissed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a ‘bout of flu’ and invited western-sanctioned Russian oligarchs to Prague. Nor is he alone. In Prague, I was invited to debate a close associate of Vaclav Klaus, Zeman’s predecessor, who complained at length about the pernicious influence of Germany and the EU. I asked him whether German companies had ever paid for Czech presidential election campaigns, as Lukoil does. He couldn’t answer.

The EU doesn’t use anonymous trolls to manipulate the media, as Russia does all over central Europe. Nor does it fund any far-right political parties, as it does in Budapest as well as Paris. Nevertheless, Hungary’s centre-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, has adopted a piece of Russia’s anti-transition message too. Last year he secured a Russian loan — the details of which were secret — for the construction of a new nuclear power plant. A few months later, he told ethnic Hungarians in Romania that it was time to abandon western ‘dogmas and ideologies’ such as liberal democracy, the form of government which was, once upon a time, the central goal of Hungary’s transition. Infamously, Orban then explained that he preferred the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Turkey, China, and of course Russia. Putin is visiting Budapest this week.

As in Prague, the relationship between Russian money for Orban’s projects and Orban’s pro-Russian and illiberal views is murky. But other things besides money may be at stake. Orban is famously nostalgic for ‘greater Hungary’, which hasn’t existed since the first world war. A small slice of that fabled lost territory is now part of Ukraine — a point the Russian foreign minister also brought up, curiously, in Munich. Perhaps this was a hint: if Russia successfully partitions Ukraine, maybe Budapest will get a slice too.

Even if Hungary doesn’t, in the end, succumb to the charms of illiberal democracy, others might. In Serbia, which is not yet an EU member (and Russia would like to keep it that way), Russian firms control the most important oil and gas companies, and Putin was recently welcomed with the largest military parade in 30 years. Slovakia has a prime minister who flirts with hardline nationalism — he has said that his country was established ‘for Slovaks, not for minorities’ — and also feels doubtful about sanctions on Russia.

Even in Poland, probably the most successful nation in central Europe and the most reliably pro-Nato, internet trolls talk of a ‘disastrous’ 25 years, and mainstream opposition politicians in full campaigning mode have been heard to dismiss Poland’s ‘Third Republic’ — 1989 to the present — as a catastrophe. Those who consider themselves ‘losers’ of the Polish transition are a minority, but they do exist. No one is fond of Russia in Poland, but that isn’t the point: Russia doesn’t need Poland, Hungary or Slovakia republic to be ruled by pro-Russian governments. They just need anti-German governments in central Europe, or anti-western governments, or simply incompetent governments that can persuade the rest of Nato to throw up their hands and say ‘we won’t fight for these people’.

A Czech or Romanian government which would join the Greeks in opposing sanctions on Russia would also be useful. A Hungarian or Bulgarian government willing to torpedo any unified European policy towards Russia, especially one which concerns oil and gas, would be better still.

If a significant number of obstreperous central Europeans came to power, it isn’t at all hard to imagine how a chunk of central Europe could break off from the European Union. Indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine how bits of what we used to call western Europe could break off from the European Union too. Greece is halfway there already. President Le Pen in France and a far-left Podemos government in Spain would also want to redraw the political map. And if the resultant economic and political crisis happened to hit Germany particularly hard, perhaps the Germans would decide to strike out on their own too, abandoning their European partners and the transatlantic alliance both.

If you were Vladimir Putin, wouldn’t you at least try it? There are still plenty of ex–Stasi informers in the eastern Lander, and plenty of former Russian agents. Nobody will notice if a few dodgy companies pay a few converted roubles into the accounts of Germany’s anti–European parties. Thanks to the Snowden affair, and the alleged bugging of Chancellor Merkel’s phone, the Germans are already pretty angry at the Americans. They’ve long since ceased to treat the British as serious geopolitical players. It wouldn’t take that much money or that many trolls to keep a drumbeat of anti-western, anti-American, anti-EU rhetoric going for a few years, as long as it takes.

We will know that it’s succeeded when the next Russian foreign minister declares the post-Cold War settlement null and void — and nobody laughs.

The era of stable government is over

Join us on 23 March for a Spectator discussion on whether the era of stable government is over with Matthew Parris, James Forsyth, Jeremy Browne MP, Vernon Bogdanor and Matthew Goodwin. The event will be chaired by Andrew Neil. In association with Seven Investment Management. For tickets and further information click here.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9447782/how-vladimir-putin-is-waging-war-on-the-west-and-winning/feed/848ironcurtainfeatured‘We’ll get out of this alive’http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9448072/a-survivor-of-the-cophenhagen-attack-speaks-if-we-should-stop-drawing-cartoons-should-we-also-stop-having-synagogues/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9448072/a-survivor-of-the-cophenhagen-attack-speaks-if-we-should-stop-drawing-cartoons-should-we-also-stop-having-synagogues/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9448072Two years ago the Danish writer Helle Brix helped found the Lars Vilks Committee. The group of media figures from left and right came together to support the Swedish artist… Read more

]]>Two years ago the Danish writer Helle Brix helped found the Lars Vilks Committee. The group of media figures from left and right came together to support the Swedish artist who has been under constant threat of death since drawing a picture of Mohammed in 2007.

‘We agreed that Mr Vilks should not be alone in the world,’ says Helle when we spoke earlier this week, ‘and if the establishment or the Swedish artists wouldn’t support him then we would. We wanted to give him a platform and a possibility to do what he used to do before he was unable to go out and meet the public because this is, of course, what disappears when you become a target, you get a lot of security around you and people are afraid to invite you. They are afraid to let you make exhibitions or have public discussions so we simply facilitate meetings in Copenhagen.’ Saturday was their eighth meeting.

Helle was beside Vilks when the shooting started. ‘I didn’t realise at first what was going on. I just said to myself, what on earth is that? And then the security guards, the Swedish security guards — because of course we always have a heavy set-up, people from Danish intelligence services, Swedish intelligence services and armed police. The Swedish security guard, he shouted “Everyone run to the back, as quickly as you can.” He also pushed Lars and me to the end of the doorway into a little storage room, locked the door and there we were under a table, Lars Vilks and I.’

‘A little later a policeman came in and we noticed a lot of blood running down his leg. He was a little confused. Lars and I realised that someone had been hit and we asked, “May we ask how serious this is?” The policeman answered that two security guards from the Danish intelligence service had been hit, a policeman, that it was not serious. But that there was someone else who was seriously hurt and he said, he didn’t look so good. The person who didn’t look so good was a Danish film director, Finn Nørgaard, who was among the audience. He later died. He had gone outside the building to make a phone call or get some fresh air and met the assassin on his way in. He was shot at close range.’

It could have been even worse. ‘I and the other committee members and the audience are enormously grateful for these brave people,’ says Helle. ‘If they hadn’t fired back when the assassin went into the lobby and tried to shoot his way into the room where we were, if they hadn’t done that, putting their lives at stake, many of us would not be alive.’

The gunman escaped and later went to a synagogue where he shot a Jewish man dead. It was the same as Paris. As Helle says: ‘First you go after the cartoonists, second you go after the Jews.’

Helle — who has been a friend of mine for some years — is part of an extraordinary circle of Danish men and women who are determined to stand their ground. They have been doing so for almost a decade. Since 2005, the list of targets has only grown. As well as repeated attempts to attack the Jyllands Posten newspaper, which ran a series of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in 2005, there was the attempted assassination of the Danish writer and historian Lars Hedegaard in 2013.

All these writers and artists are well aware that freedom has enemies these days. Just last year the Vilks committee gave its free speech award to the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose editor came to Copenhagen to collect the prize. On Saturday, the meeting was opened by the French ambassador.

‘The plan was for Inna Shevchenko, the leader of [the feminist activist group] Femen, and Agnieszka Kolek, the art curator, and Lars Vilks to discuss “Is it really worth risking your life for freedom of speech, should there really not be any limits to what we can say, write and draw?” Shevchenko had just started her talk when the shooting began.

What was Helle thinking as she sat under the table with Vilks, holding hands? There were some boxes with beer for the café. ‘Mr Vilks took out a beer and lifted it up and said, well Helle, if we have to stay much longer at least we have something to drink. I was just thinking to myself, “We are going to get out alive”.’

When they were allowed back into the main room, the police said they shouldn’t leave the venue. It was then that Helle noticed the slightly surreal sight of Agnieszka Kolek on the stage doing the Power Point presentation she had been due to give about the ‘Passion for Freedom’, an art exhibition she held in London last year. ‘Agnieszka got the idea: OK, we can’t leave the room so why not discuss freedom of speech?’

‘I’m shocked but I can’t say this attack was a complete surprise,’ Helle admits. ‘Of course if the security people had said look, it’s not wise, we can’t guarantee Mr Vilks’s safety or the audience’s safety, we would not have done so.’

‘But I think the reason for supporting Lars Vilks is that it is not only Lars Vilks we are supporting. He is defending all of society because if he cannot live out his right to freedom of speech then we do not really have, to its full extent, freedom of speech. So he is pointing his finger at why Islam is the only religion to be entitled to stick to this taboo that Islam cannot be criticised, the prophet cannot be depicted and all this?’

Some people say they should stop drawing cartoons. ‘If we should stop drawing cartoons, should we also stop having synagogues, should they be converted into something else? Should we ask the Jewish people to leave or are they leaving already because they rightly so fear for their safety?’

‘I have heard an awful lot of politicians saying an awful lot, but I have not heard many concrete suggestions as to what do we do about this problem. What do we do about the fact that we have a growing number of young Muslims in European countries who are so eager to meet death in paradise and think that jihad is the way, that we can expect so much more of this in the future?’

]]>Some of the longest job descriptions belong to rural Church of England clergy. ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I’m the Rector of Aldwincle, Clopton, Pilton, Stoke Doyle, Thorpe Achurch, Titchmarsh and Wadenhoe.’ Every one of these place names evokes an ancient Pevsner-worthy church, smelling of candlewax, damp hymn books and brass polish. Though many villages no longer have a shop or a pub, most do still have a parish church used for regular services — even if only on the first and third Sunday of the month. You push open the creaky door, and last Sunday’s hymns are still up on the hymn board.

Last week the brilliant blind member of the House of Laity John Spence (whose mesmerising speech in the final debate on women bishops swayed the vote towards ‘yes’) warned that the Church could be ‘eliminated’ from rural areas in ten years’ time. ‘If you look at [the] arithmetic projection you identify that, over the period 2007 to 2057, church attendance and membership would fall from 1.2 million on a regular basis to something like two or three hundred thousand.’

Can the current situation go on, in our 10,000 rural churches? Tiny congregations, with few people under 70; overworked clergy racing from church to church, having no time to chat to parishioners after each service, worn down by having six Grade I churches to look after, underpaid or not paid at all and at a loss as to how to make more people come to their Family Communion?

The truth of the daily struggle was revealed to me by the Revd Jo Saunders, rector of Great Casterton, Little Casterton, Pickworth and Tickencote in Rutland. When I rang her, she was applying for a grant to mend the heating system in her smallest and poorest church. ‘It will only cost £600, but that’s more than we’ve got. I worry all the time. I simply can’t physically do everything.’ Tickencote only has services in the summer months. The average attendance is six. ‘We’d keep it going till the last one disappears.’ She was proud to tell me that two new families had moved in to Pickworth, which had doubled the congregation to 12.

It’s odd: we see from the stark statistics that attendance numbers are in decline, but I have yet to talk to a single clergyperson who admits that numbers are going down in his or her parish or benefice. Vicars express concern about the general picture but the problem always seems to be in somebody else’s parish. They’re certainly good at presenting their own attendance figures in an optimistic light. Canon Jim Mynors, rector of the seven parishes near Oundle named above, told me, ‘The total population of our seven parishes is 1,400. Over the Christmas period we have 1,300 attending our churches: that’s almost the whole population.’ Michael Hampson, vicar of Hornby, Whittington, Arkholme and Gressingham in Lancashire, said, ‘Our numbers are steady and even creeping up.’

‘Do new 70-year-olds come when the old ones die?’ I asked him.

‘They do,’ he said, and gave me another statistic. ‘Remember: in rural ministry you get 10 per cent of the population coming to church. In urban ministry it’s only 1 per cent.’

Take that, you townies! There seems to be a vigorous rural-versus-urban rivalry going on in the C of E. A report published last week, called ‘Released for Mission: Growing the Rural Church’, tells us (amid endless deadening abstract nouns, e.g. ‘Congregations are empowered to take ownership of their own collective life through worship, mission and outreach’) that while 29 per cent of urban parishes are declining, only 25 per cent of rural ones are.

There’s a feeling in rural parishes that the Church is run on an urban model by urban people from Church House. Part of the way of dealing with urban decline has been to close churches. But the rural clergy believe that while this might work in towns (because there will be an open church nearby), in rural areas closing churches doesn’t work. People feel attached to their villages, and while they’ll happily drive five miles to a supermarket, they’re reluctant to do the same to go to a church service in someone else’s village.

If you can stay awake to disentangle that sentence about mission and outreach, you get to the gist of what the report is saying: that the only way to make it all work in rural benefices is for the congregation to be an essential part of the ministry. ‘The role of the priest is to support the ministry of the Church, not to do it.’ The idea is that everyone who is baptised has the commission to go out and share the Good News. In other words, the Church needs free labour, and lots of it, if the treasured tradition of regular worship in tiny parish churches is to continue.

An extinct village church gives out a strong message that the Church is dead. Michael Hampson told me that in his group of Lancashire parishes, one of the churches was closed and sold off, and it’s now owned ‘by a rich playboy who’s letting it fall down’. There is something creepy about churches turned into houses: marital sex in the belfry and a graveyard for a garden, let alone the windows all being at the wrong height. As Canon Mark Roberts, Rector of Sandwich, says, ‘For our generation to be the one that cuts the chain going back to the early centuries of the Christian faith would be shameful.’

The Canon Chancellor of Exeter Cathedral, Anna Norman Walker, has had another idea, and one that is now being talked about: struggling churches could avoid closure by signing up to become ‘Festival Churches’. The village would pay for the upkeep of the church in exchange for having it as a usable community building; but at church festivals (Christmas, Harvest, Mothering Sunday, Easter) it would be open for services. Details will need to be discussed, but this suggestion at least faces up to the fact that most of us are now occasional rather than regular attenders.

Linda Woodhead, professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University, conducted a recent survey asking clergy and laity the question ‘What does the C of E offer?’ The top clergy answer was ‘it’s at the heart of local communities’; the top laity answer was ‘culture and heritage’. This suggests a mismatch between clergy and lay expectations. The laity are hungry for the numinous.

Many rural parish services are dispiritingly prosaic. The parish communion (which only came into fashion in the 1950s) seems to have swollen to over an hour and a quarter. It’s time to cut the padding — even the sermon. There’s no need to give out the parish notices about the mums and toddlers group when they’re already written on the sheet. It breaks the spell. Don’t dumb down. Call it ‘a confirmation class’, not ‘Teenage Central’. We go to church in search of a brief but intense dose of holiness, beauty and devotion. If the Church gave us more of that, could its decline be halted?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446782/it-takes-a-village-or-six-the-battle-for-rural-churches/feed/91104665676featuredEscape to victoryhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446712/ve-day-anniversary-why-politics-will-take-second-place-the-day-after-the-election/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446712/ve-day-anniversary-why-politics-will-take-second-place-the-day-after-the-election/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9446712Breakfast is under way on 8 May 2015, and the party leaders have already started haggling. The possibility of a loveless Labour/SNP ‘anti-austerity’ pact has sent the markets tumbling. With… Read more

]]>Breakfast is under way on 8 May 2015, and the party leaders have already started haggling. The possibility of a loveless Labour/SNP ‘anti-austerity’ pact has sent the markets tumbling. With the largest number of seats but no overall majority, the Tories are making eyes at the least un-attractive potential bedfellows. Assorted pressure groups are trying to rekindle the same ‘Purple Protest’ movement which sought to exploit the political void immediately after the 2010 election. Having spent all night telling the television cameras that all this voting stuff is, like, rubbish, an exhausted Russell Brand urges his followers to rise up and do, er, something. But the protestors find that the streets are already full of people. Like it or not, the politicians have to curtail their horse-trading, brush their hair and join them all.

Because whichever way votes are cast on 7 May, all the party leaders will now be obliged to attend the same victory party on 8 May. The body language should be exquisite.

The 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe day should be a salutary reminder that there are some things even bigger than politics. A formal ceremony at the Cenotaph on the afternoon of 8 May will kick off three days of concerts, services and street parties — plus a parade through central London — to mark, surely, one of the greatest days in British history. The royal family, buoyed by the arrival of a new baby a few days earlier, will be out in force. The ceremonies, broadcast live on the BBC, will be a tribute to the wartime generation. Unlike, say, last year’s poignant and powerful commemorations of the 70th anniversary of D-day, VE day will focus not only on the Forces but on everyone who helped Britain to victory — Land Girls, evacuees, Bevin Boys, Bletchley Park codebreakers, boy scouts and Captain Mainwaring. This will be their last assembly in significant numbers.

With just ten weeks to go, however, plans remain sketchy. Until last week, they barely existed. A team of Ministry of Defence officials had cobbled together a service at Westminster Abbey for Sunday 10 May but there simply hadn’t been much interest in organising a major state occasion the day after a general election. An online petition and lobbying campaign had failed to generate much enthusiasm. When the Speaker, John Bercow, announced those anniversaries that Parliament would commemorate this year, he included the Battle of Agincourt (600 years ago) and the Sex Discrimination Act (which is turning 40). But VE day wasn’t on the list. Nor, for that matter, was VJ day — 15 August 1945 — when we remember the victory of the ‘Forgotten Army’ over Japan and the final cessation of hostilities.

After lamenting this omission in the Daily Mail earlier this month, I was intrigued to see an abrupt and dramatic change of plan. Suddenly, the MoD was no longer in charge. No. 10, it turned out, had taken over this anniversary and the Prime Minister had personally appointed his own minister for VE day. William Hague, no less, was charged with arranging a three-day event.

The former Conservative leader and ex-foreign secretary, who will be leaving the Commons after 26 years on 7 May, is, of course, an accomplished historian in his own right. And as a member of John Major’s government, he will not have forgotten the emotion and the uncomplicated spirit of national unity which accompanied the 50th anniversary of VE day in 1995. World leaders and millions of people descended on London; Dame Vera Lynn and the soon-to-be-knighted Cliff Richard serenaded the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret beneath the palace balcony. That year would turn out to be a dismal one for the Prime Minister; just weeks later he was having to fight a leadership contest.

But those four days of exuberant tributes to the war generation would remain a highlight of John Major’s premiership and followed his appointment of two ministers to supervise it all: the then leader of the Lords, Viscount Cranborne, and the heritage minister, Viscount Astor (Cameron’s stepfather-in-law).

It all helps to explain this sudden change of plan for the 70th. The Prime Minister, with more pressing issues than bunting and Glenn Miller-themed hog roasts on his to-do list for early May, was probably unaware of the paucity of VE day planning. Realising the situation, Cameron and his core team could suddenly foresee a big bucket of opprobrium looming. No politician wants ‘Heroes snubbed’ headlines in election week. And besides, he can well remember those epic scenes two decades back.

Another factor, I am told, is the importance being attached to first impressions on the morning after. One shrewd retiree from Cameron’s cabinet has been reminding him that if he does end up having to form a viable minority government, appearances and atmosphere during those formative days after the vote will be crucial. Better to evoke echoes of Churchill than associations with Michael Foot and his donkey jacket.

There will certainly be no attempt to ‘merge’ VE day celebrations with VJ day commemorations, as Tony Blair’s government tried — and failed — to do for the 60th anniversary in 2005. The ‘Forgotten Army’, quite rightly, will get their own parade in August.

Major Sir Michael Parker, the maestro behind every national event from the Royal Tournament to the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday parade, was the producer of those central VE and VJ day events in 1995. He still recalls the institutional pessimism. ‘All the authorities and officials insisted that no one was interested, that no one was going to come,’ he chuckles. ‘Then they all complained when two-and-a-quarter million people turned up.’

This time around, the authorities may be grateful for the attention. Those agitators heading to Westminster to exploit any political stalemate on 8 May might be expecting a scrap with the cops. But who would be dumb enough to pick a fight with several thousand old warriors, war widows, Blitz surviors and Dame Vera Lynn?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446712/ve-day-anniversary-why-politics-will-take-second-place-the-day-after-the-election/feed/14WRACS CelebratefeaturedIn your facehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446422/attack-of-the-personal-space-invaders/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446422/attack-of-the-personal-space-invaders/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9446422It’s the shoulders you have to watch out for. If he’s pressing them back as his hand comes out to shake yours, then beware: you’re about to meet a Space… Read more

Listen

It’s the shoulders you have to watch out for. If he’s pressing them back as his hand comes out to shake yours, then beware: you’re about to meet a Space Invader.

It’s tricky, being an alpha male in polite 21st-century society. Gone are the days when you could expect other men to gather round, worshipping your medallion as it glistened on a bed of luxuriant chest hair. Now you have to subvert the genre. You have to go to them. You have to get in their face, literally.

There’s a particular breed of alpha who displays his credentials by standing unnervingly close to you, his face just a few inches from yours, eye contact maintained for what seems like centuries. Some of them even avoid blinking. Or is that just how it feels?

The subtext is clear: ‘We are men of the world, you and I. Or rather New Men of the New World. We are not bound by the conventions of the past, the rigid formality of an uptight era. We feel no shame in standing so close to each other that we could compare dental records.’

Space Invaders don’t lean in, they step up, resolutely and proudly vertical as their toes almost meet yours. It’s all done with a conspiratorial smile, recognition that you’re two of the in-crowd, rejecting the other losers around you, two alphas together. Well don’t take this the wrong way, Mr Invader, but get lost, would you? I am defiantly un-alpha. In fact I’m way past beta, so far down the Greek alphabet even an Oxford don would struggle to find me.

It happened at a party the other night. The guy was an inch shorter than me, but no matter, an extra backwards thrust of the shoulders and retinal parity was established.

Talking of which, his glasses were another giveaway: rimless Scandinavian jobs. Invaders always wear these, again as part of their genre-subversion — massive multicoloured frames with ‘Gucci’ plastered down the stems would be way too obvious. The other thing they’re careful about is their breath. No arrogant munching of garlic-laden hors d’oeuvres just before buttonholing you: that too would be unforgivably old-school. For this I suppose we should be grateful.

Normally you put up with your territory being encroached on, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel. But this time I decided to stand my ground. Or rather the opposite: I took a discrete half-step backwards, re-establishing a comfortable distance between myself and Invader. But he was determined. Forwards he came, once again getting up close and personal.

You can guess what happened: soon I was retreating like a 1970s secretary before a Radio 1 DJ. This wasn’t easy, as the party was crowded and I had a constant fear of ploughing into a group of people having their glasses refilled. After a while I realised we were nearing a wall — oh God, soon my back would be against it, in both senses. What would happen then? Fortunately I managed to inveigle a third party into the conversation. Disaster averted.

It’s the patronising element that winds you up. ‘Hey,’ the Invader is saying, ‘I’ve clocked you, you’re as impressive as me. Let’s get together.’ Anyone who feels the need to big themselves up by pretending to big you up has issues I’d rather not engage with, certainly not at a range of three inches. I don’t care about, or believe, their implied message: they’re so interested in you that they have to give you all their attention, stand so close that they couldn’t do the ‘looking over your shoulder for someone more important’ trick even if they wanted to.

The other unspoken element is sexuality. ‘I’m so secure in my straightness,’ an Invader seems to be saying, ‘that I can engage in this level of physical proximity without anyone thinking it might in any way be construed as a come-on. Look, our crotches are virtually touching, and yet such is my manliness that no observer could possibly imagine I’m trying to gay you up.’

I hate to be the one to break it to you, old chum, but don’t you think you’re protesting a little too much? I bet you’re the sort of guy who stands there ostentatiously towelling himself in the gym changing room, aren’t you? ‘What, I’ve been standing here in front of you stark naked for five minutes without even attempting to put a stitch of clothing on, you say? I’d barely noticed.’ All very well until the day you do it to Miles from finance and end up realising you didn’t know Miles — or indeed yourself — quite as well as you’d thought. Ten days and one incredible weekend in Morocco later and you’re composing a difficult email to your wife.

So on balance, Mr Invader, it might be an idea to keep your distance. In personal space no one can hear you scream.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446422/attack-of-the-personal-space-invaders/feed/5HandshakefeaturedLetter from Parishttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/notebook/9446052/the-dark-comedy-of-the-senate-torture-report/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/notebook/9446052/the-dark-comedy-of-the-senate-torture-report/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9446052Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports, it sometimes brings out in me the opposite of sincere… Read more

]]>Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports, it sometimes brings out in me the opposite of sincere curiosity so essential to my trade. Thus when my French publisher asked me to write a preface to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s report on the CIA’s torture programme, and come to Paris to promote a translated edition, I was reluctant. Hadn’t I already read everything about this? As much as I detest the CIA and love Paris, a book tour to discuss waterboarding and forced rectal feeding struck me as less than appealing.

Nevertheless, civic duty spurred me and a lawyer colleague to write the preface. So I read the report — all 500 or so pages of it — first in English and then in French. To my great surprise I learned that the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture moves right along, with an authorial voice, lots of irony and plenty of gruesome detail that wasn’t in the newspapers. The principal writer, a former FBI analyst named Daniel Jones, renders the story of the CIA’s gratuitous brutality with a rhythmic repetition that approaches literature. Again and again, we’re told, detainees were grabbed by the CIA or its proxies, transported to secret prisons, subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, and eventually dropped because they didn’t reveal anything useful, or they invented stories, or, as in the case of the suspected Afghan militant Gul Rahman, died. Then, after ploughing through many pages of CIA boasting about success in foiling terrorist plots, we find out that the agency’s ‘representations were almost entirely inaccurate’ and that torture foiled not a single plot. The former FBI man has fun hanging his CIA rivals with their own words, such as when then CIA director Porter Goss briefs senators about how ‘professionally operated’ CIA detention techniques are compared with the Abu Ghraib variety: ‘We are not talking military, and I’m not talking about anything that a contractor might have done… in a prison somewhere or beat somebody or hit somebody with a stick or something.’ No, we’re talking about chaining a prisoner to the ceiling, making him wear a nappy, and letting him soil himself. After slamming him into a wall.

Once I began to appreciate the funny parts, I was good to go. However, a month before my torture tour was to begin, Muslim terrorists murdered 11 people at Charlie Hebdo and four at a kosher supermarket, and France was thrust into something resembling the debate after 9/11. The day I arrived in Paris, a certain Frédéric Péchenard, of Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, complained in Le Figaro that French security services can’t place bugs and wiretaps or track phones without a warrant. He wasn’t asking for the right to waterboard, mind you, but the US Patriot Act, passed in the chaotic wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, was also intended to give the police broader powers to stop terrorism. The CIA and the Bush White House evidently took the Patriot Act to mean carte blanche for ignoring the constitution and the Geneva conventions, so I had a good talking point. Péchenard remained my invisible adversary over three days of non-stop media appearances.

Most of my French interviewers had little sympathy for Péchenard’s demand for a Patriot Act à la française. On France Inter, my radio host Nicolas Demorand played a conversation with a prominent juge d’instruction who said that moral principle alone should rule out the use of torture — effectiveness shouldn’t even enter into the debate. As a civil libertarian, I think it’s a lovely sentiment, but as a dual American and French citizen, I felt obliged to insist on this point: torture doesn’t work. Without that clearly understood, I fear that we civil libertarians lose the argument with Dick Cheney. Unfortunately, a lot of people believe what they see in movies like Zero Dark Thirty.

The police can’t keep watch on every potential terrorist all the time, as the Charlie Hebdo killings demonstrated. So I wasn’t displeased to be greeted by a rifle-toting French soldier at the entrance to every studio and newspaper I visited. In fact, I thanked each of them coming and going, especially when visiting friends at the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné and the left-wing Le Monde diplomatique. The venerable Canard is a brash publication closer in spirit to Charlie Hebdo than, say, the Financial Times, but it’s easy to overlook in its obscure, unadvertised old building on the Rue St Honoré. Upstairs, the sangfroid displayed by the staff was notable, especially since their star comic-strip contributor and caricaturist, Cabu, was among those killed. Even more impressive was the excellent investigative story in their new issue about the Imsi-catcher, a device that allows French cops and spies to intercept texts, conversations, and emails sent from mobile phones. As the Canard writer explains, ‘No need to go through an operator: no trace of the intercept and no controls’ — in short, Frédéric Péchenard’s (as well as Marine Le Pen’s and Dick Cheney’s) dream come true. Top-of-the-line Imsi-catchers cost ‘several hundred thousand euros’, but who’s counting when you get to listen not only to a suspect but also to everyone using a phone nearby, including journalists?

Paris is supposed to be the city of light, and the French commitment to personal liberty (at least if you believe the spirit exhibited at the mass ‘Je suis Charlie’ demonstration) unflagging. My interlocutor from the pro-Sarkozy, centre-right Figaro was the very lively Charles Jaigu, the journalist who did the sympathetic interview with Péchenard that I cited everywhere on my tour. In his column called ‘Tête à Tête’, Jaigu, while highlighting his political differences with me, wrote that France had not yet ‘tipped into psychosis’ of the American sort that would lead to torture. No question of carte blanche for the police. With the Front National on the rise, I hope he’s right.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/notebook/9446052/the-dark-comedy-of-the-senate-torture-report/feed/20letterfrom-paris_21FEBfeaturedSworn outhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446142/when-did-the-advertising-industry-get-so-obsessed-with-swearing-and-innuendo/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446142/when-did-the-advertising-industry-get-so-obsessed-with-swearing-and-innuendo/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9446142When did the advertising industry decide that swearing sells? Look around you, and you’ll start to see rude, unfunny double entendres everywhere. The latest company to jump on the bandwagon… Read more

]]>When did the advertising industry decide that swearing sells? Look around you, and you’ll start to see rude, unfunny double entendres everywhere. The latest company to jump on the bandwagon is Toyota — currently flogging cars with the catchphrase, ‘Go Fun Yourself’. Try not to split your sides laughing.

I blame French Connection. In 1991, the once respectable clothes shop started referring to itself as fcuk. The company began knocking out T-shirts, saying nasty things like ‘Too busy to fcuk’ and ‘fcuk fashion’. The campaign was such a hit that, God help us, Conservative Future — formerly the Young Conservatives — called itself ‘cfuk’ for a while, until French Connection threatened legal action.

I’m all for double entendre. When handled brilliantly — fnaar! fnaar! — by Frankie Howerd or Viz’s ‘Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres’, it can be startlingly funny and original. Oh, for a swearing adman to match up to the double entendres of Kenneth Williams in Carry On Doctor:

Dr [Kenneth Williams]: ‘You may not realise it, but I was once a weak man.’

Matron [Hattie Jacques]: ‘Oh, don’t worry. Once a week’s enough for any man.’

The fcuk campaign was merely prurient and unfunny, because the structure of the joke was so banal. Turn two letters around and it sounds like a rude word; hardly comic genius. ‘Fcuk fashion’ isn’t much of a leap from ‘fuck fashion’ — and that isn’t an original, funny thing to say, either.

Still, the idea was so successful that desperate admen have copied it ever since. The principle remains unchanged — use a lame double entendre to barely conceal something rude, and the punters will rush to buy your stuff.

The upmarket Malmaison hotel chain has gone for the idea in spades. Staying in its Dundee outpost recently, I took advantage of the ‘Malmaison fig and olive body cleanser’. Using the fig ingredient as an inadequate peg, the tube declared it was ‘gettin’ jiggy wit’ da figgy’; ‘away from home, you want sexy foam, something to make them (ooh ooh ooh) moan and groan, squeeze the tube, that’s quite enuff, oh my lord, you look hot in the buff, now all clean, no longer dirty, isn’t it time for you to get flirty?’

Not funny — and not exciting: the only thing that got me going was the bad punctuation. Admen loathe commas, full stops and capital letters.

The same tired, offensive principle is at work on the side of an oyster van I recently saw outside the National Theatre. ‘Fancy a shuck?’ the sign said in twirly, retro, 1950s letters. I bet they were pleased with that — so much more shocking if you say rude things in an old-fashioned font.

I’m now operating my own, one-man, utterly pointless boycott of products promoted by horrible double entendre. I’m a bicycling obsessive but I refuse to use the popular bike-cleaning product ‘Muc-Off’. Presumably, they think that, by removing the ‘k’ from ‘muck’, it somehow makes the double entendre funnier. It doesn’t.

You can’t avoid the unfunny double entendre on telly, either. The holiday website booking.com has a voiceover on its advertisements saying ‘Look at the booking view.’ Mary Whitehouse, where are you now?

High fashion isn’t immune. Just before Christmas, the super-sophisticated fashionista Tom Ford launched a range of penis-shaped necklaces. Like a naughty schoolboy let loose on the catwalk, Ford designed the penis so that, from a distance, it looked like a crucifix — a jewellery double entendre, available in gold or silver. It was a brilliantly offensive trifecta: offensive to Christians; offensive to anyone who dislikes public obscenity; and offensively expensive, at $790.

At Christmas, Adam Mansbach brought out You Have to F**king Eat, the sequel to his parental advice book, Go the F**k to Sleep. Also on the seasonal shelves was Thug Kitchen: Eat Like You Give a F*ck, with useful advice like ‘This salsa lets people know you aren’t fucking around with your snack spread.’ We’ve reached peak fuck. Rude words have been thoroughly overexposed. As teachers used to say, ‘It’s not clever and it’s not funny.’

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9446142/when-did-the-advertising-industry-get-so-obsessed-with-swearing-and-innuendo/feed/10A worker stands in front of British fashfeaturedSicilyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9447472/an-earthquake-with-a-baroque-legacy/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9447472/an-earthquake-with-a-baroque-legacy/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9447472Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which has been the backdrop to many Mediterranean sagas: Hellenic, Christian,… Read more

]]>Syracuse is a handsome place, steeped in a rich historical broth. At the tip sits Ortygia, an island offshoot, which has been the backdrop to many Mediterranean sagas: Hellenic, Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque — take your pick. By day, Via de Benedictis is filled with local men selling sea urchins, milky balls of ricotta and bunches of mint. At night, we went to the Piazza Duoma for aperitifs. The cathedral’s broken pediments and exuberant sculpture cast strange shadows on to the square and a zephyr blew. It was November and the place was empty, aside from a small boy on rollerskates and a dog. In summer it must swarm with people.

An earthquake destroyed much of southern and eastern Sicily in 1693, and many of the towns were rebuilt in a Baroque style. You can reach them all by car; goodness knows how you’d see them without one. I’d always thought driving holidays were deeply uncool — at the same end of the spectrum as cruises and rambling. But what a joy it turned out to be to whizz along a clear, Mafia-funded motorway! I can see why people get into it.

The southern towns of Noto, Ragusa and Modica were all rebuilt with much vigour. They are packed full of 17th-century treats — golden-stone churches set among the palm trees, extravagant marble concoctions, paintings by Caravaggio. ‘Look at us, Rome,’ they say. Another seismic shock might smash it all again one day. Would today’s architects rebuild with such opulence? I doubt it.

Modica is famous for its granular chocolate. Tucked just off the town’s main road is Antica Dolceria Bonajuto, which has been selling bars of it since 1880. The waxed paper packaging hasn’t changed since that time and is delightful, as is the town’s hot chocolate, which is so thick that a spoon can stand up in it. Nearby is Sampieri beach — a great sweep of soft sand, with an abandoned tile factory perched at the far point. We had the whole place to ourselves, save for a fisherman in a dark blue smock netting a small catch where the water foamed. The wind was warm, the sea icy.

Our final drive took us inland, towards Mount Etna and the nearby town of Piazza Armerina. The landscape changes from the rugged and intricate to the broad; vast planes of arable soil, barely changed in millennia and dotted with wonderful Roman ruins, like the Villa Romana del Casale. A fortified 17th-century farm called Masseria Mandrascate, set up high amid the fertile soils, made an excellent base to visit these sites from. For breakfast, we had eggs, olive oil and prickly pears and imagined how life had changed over the centuries. Not much, we thought. Sicily seemed empty — and our car something of an aberration in the ancient land, where the orange harvest had just begun.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9447472/an-earthquake-with-a-baroque-legacy/feed/0dyfeaturedClick and flickhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438622/i-wouldnt-want-to-be-a-girl-in-the-age-of-tinder/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438622/i-wouldnt-want-to-be-a-girl-in-the-age-of-tinder/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9438622My foray into the world of online dating was short-lived. Within a few hours of my profile going live, a deluge of young men in their early twenties began to… Read more

]]>My foray into the world of online dating was short-lived. Within a few hours of my profile going live, a deluge of young men in their early twenties began to bombard me with messages.

I was shocked and somewhat delighted. At my age, I had expected mostly sad widowers and maybe the odd divorced equine veterinarian, encouraged by the pictures of me on my horses. To attract a clamour of Ashton Kutchers was beyond my wildest dreams because, although I was now undoubtedly in the cougar age group, I really hadn’t seen myself as a Demi Moore.

When I opened the messages, however, any notion that these handsome young men were about to whisk me on a romantic dinner date, then marry me on a windswept beach, evaporated.

I can’t quote the messages exactly, because I deleted them, but the gist of them was this: ‘Hey there, you hot 40-something Milf! I bet you could teach a college student like me a thing or two! What are you doing tonight? How about we get together at your place? (We can’t meet at mine because my parents are home tonight). What’s your address?’

In other words, these eager young bucks were cutting straight to the chase. Actually, to be more accurate, they weren’t bothering with the chase. They were cutting straight to the kill. I had to inform them that, despite my advanced years, I knew nothing interesting whatsoever to do in bed, unless you counted eating club sandwiches while watching old box sets of Columbo.

But they weren’t all asking for sex that very night. Some of them demanded I send them a sample picture of the goods before they decided whether to come round. ‘How very dare you!’ I replied, before shutting down my profile.

I quickly realised that, no matter how it started, online dating — and possibly all dating, because most dating is online now— had become pornographic in its pared-down urgency. No dinner, no dancing. Just sexting — followed by actual sex if you were lucky.

Welcome to love in the age of instant gratification. Since the dawn of the digital era, dating has become so focused on the immediate and the mechanical that the possibility for romance has been extinguished.

And now there’s Tinder, the smartphone app offering you thousands of possible dates in your area, where you click on the photos of the ones you fancy. This is speed dating taken to the extreme, based on looks alone. It is choosing a person as you would choose an apple or a potato — ooh, this one’s a bit lumpy, throw it back.

I don’t worry too much on my account. At least I’ve had romance. Back in the Eighties, it was quite the thing. But for young people trying to find a mate now, there is only the brutal marketplace of Tinder and Snapchat. iLove is all they know.

Last week, a 14-year-old boy became the youngest person in Britain to be prosecuted under so-called revenge porn laws. His 15-year-old girlfriend had sent him naked pictures of herself and when they broke up he sold the pictures on Facebook for a tenner. So she sued him. A real 2.0 love story.

The boy’s actions are shocking, of course. But perhaps the real scandal is that kids are growing up in an environment where it is normal to send each other naked pictures. Whereas once a girl felt confident to slap a man’s face when he went too far, now women increasingly feel pressured to comply with demands to cheapen themselves.

Consequently, what young people know about romance you could write on a Tinder profile. The ancient art of courtship is dying. They don’t understand the need for a narrative, that something else must be going on apart from the sex — like rescuing, if you want to be traditional.

Do today’s teenagers even know about Richard Gere in his white navy uniform sweeping Debra Winger off her feet? Or Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner to dance? Or Julie Andrews falling for Christopher Plummer as he sings Edelweiss?

I doubt it. If Maria were on Tinder now, she’d swipe away von Trapp’s image with one flick of her index finger. ‘Ooh, no. Too intense-looking.’

As for Romeo, he would stand beneath Juliet’s balcony and exclaim: ‘But soft! what light from yonder window breaks?

‘It is the iPhone 6, and Juliet is reading my sext!

‘Get your kit off, fair lady, and send me a picture of your tits!’

Of course, modern life being hurried, we need to arrange dates quickly and move on if they don’t work. Your average career girl doesn’t have time to amble along with a guy who isn’t going to offer baby-making services after six months of dating, a year tops. Fine, I get that.

But even fixing people up in an artificial way used to be more romantic. When I was a student, I worked for a dating agency during the summer. It was the old-fashioned kind, with an office full of ring binders featuring women in their thirties and forties and men who just wanted to ‘have fun and explore the world with that special lady’.

We put these hopefuls together with lots of tactical thought about how they might mix, personality-wise. Remember personality? It was big in the Nineties. It used to be what counted before online porn made men want their sexual partners to look like Paris Hilton.

People picked each other at this dating agency by flicking through photos. But we often persuaded clients to meet those they weren’t immediately attracted to. Often, these were the happiest pairings. The marriage rate was impressive.

Perhaps that’s the point. People don’t want long-lasting relationships any more. They want quick and disposable flings. They want virtual not real.

Which brings me back to sexting. Like most women, I’ve been on the receiving end of this. Some years ago, a male friend started pestering me to send him naked pictures. But whenever I put it to him that I was single, and he was single, and that we could always meet up and go on a date, he always backed off. He didn’t want sex, you see. He wanted sext.

Sext is not sex. It is its own particular creature. Like a digital photo that never gets printed out, a sext session pleases a certain kind of man precisely because it doesn’t exist in reality. It is the lowest maintenance human contact possible. And, above all, it is fast.

The same goes for Tinder, which boasts: ‘It’s like real life, but better.’ A more honest slogan would be: ‘It’s like real life, but less bother.’ You would think, wouldn’t you, that the site was confined to young people? You would hope it didn’t impinge upon the middle-aged or the elderly.

I’m afraid to tell you that a friend of mine, aged 50, has put himself on Tinder. Stung by a bad divorce, he decided to get himself out there. Flick, flick, flick, he goes, his finger pushing at his iPhone screen as he trawls through the endless photos of hopeful-looking women attempting seductive pouts.

‘No, no, no,’ he says, as he flicks them away, dismissing one smiley face after another as they fly past his view in the most fleeting of split seconds.

‘But how do you know? Hang on, that one looks OK,’ I say.

‘No good. Mad eyes.’ Flick, flick, flick.

Occasionally, he meets one he likes the look of and they go on a date. If he has to spend too much on dinner in return for too little action, he doesn’t see her again.

The best result, the ultimate Tinder hit, he assures me, is a woman who puts out after a meal costing less than £15 a head. Nando’s and a handos, you might call it.

Like most people on Tinder, he often insists that he is looking for love, but I’m not convinced. The women might be looking for love, but not the men. Every now and then, he tells me I ought to get myself on it. I tell him I’d rather put myself inside the main auction pen at Hailsham cattle market.

The worse thing is that the Tinder contagion is spreading. The flick, flick, flick attitude has taken hold in clubs and bars. No one chats you up any more unless you are exactly what they are looking for, physically speaking.

A friend tells me that she recently saw a young guy in a bar making a leftwards swiping gesture with his hand to his male friend every time they saw a girl they didn’t fancy. ‘He was swiping them away like they were faces on his phone screen,’ she said.

Don’t judge the guy too harshly. The Tinder generation doesn’t know how to get to know you. They have been encouraged to shop online for their ideal mate, guaranteed next-day delivery. They have been led to believe that if they google enough they will find just what they want.

As I say, I don’t worry for myself. My dating days are over bar the shouting, thank goodness. But for today’s young people, it’s a tragedy. For them, the endless choice on the screen is an illusion.

Locked in their virtual dating world, the faces on their iPhones flick past ever faster. There are thousands to get excited about. It’s just The One who isn’t there.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438622/i-wouldnt-want-to-be-a-girl-in-the-age-of-tinder/feed/163coverfeaturefeaturedIn praise of Ed Milibandhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438172/ed-milibands-biggest-critics-dont-hate-him-for-how-hes-failed-they-hate-him-for-how-hes-succeeded/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438172/ed-milibands-biggest-critics-dont-hate-him-for-how-hes-failed-they-hate-him-for-how-hes-succeeded/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9438172Most political commentators consider Ed Miliband a useless leader. In a narrow sense they are right. He is not very good at getting a positive press or eliciting the support… Read more

Listen

Most political commentators consider Ed Miliband a useless leader. In a narrow sense they are right. He is not very good at getting a positive press or eliciting the support of important outside voices in the media and the business community. Even small stories of no consequence have the potential to turn into minor nightmares for Mr Miliband. The latest of these is his education spokesman Tristram Hunt’s innocuous remark about nuns, transformed by a voracious press into a minor scandal.

Mr Miliband’s bacon sandwich is a far more damaging example of the same phenomenon. But let us take a step backwards and avert our eyes from day to day headlines and political manoeuvres.

Suddenly, Mr Miliband becomes a far more interesting, significant and distinctive figure. Most politicians allow themselves to be shaped by the landscape in which they operate. Only in appearance are they independent figures. In practice they abide by the pieties of the age in which they live. There are certain exceptions to this rule. Enoch Powell — but he never got anywhere. Margaret Thatcher — indisputably.

Like them, Ed Miliband has been his own person, forged his own course and actually been consistent. It is easy to identify four defining phases of his leadership in which he has challenged the underlying structures which govern Westminster conduct.

The first of these came nine months into his leadership, when he confronted the power of the Rupert Murdoch and challenged his bid for the remaining shares in BSkyB. Up to that point every single political leader from Margaret Thatcher on had wooed Murdoch and considered that his support was an essential route to political power.

There is no question that he was effective in changing the terms of trade. We do not need to resort to conjecture to demonstrate this, as we know that the Prime Minister sent a message to Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, in which he apologised for not being as loyal to her as she had been to him because ‘Ed Miliband had me on the run’.

Shortly afterwards, Mr Miliband made a well-judged speech on the abuse of corporate power. Once again he was defying the conventional wisdom, once again prevalent since the days of Margaret Thatcher, that the path to Downing Street involved flattering the business community.

Then came the vital parliamentary vote on Syria in 2013. According to the political textbook, oppositions always support government proposals on foreign policy, as Iain Duncan Smith did over Iraq. Mr Miliband’s action stopped Britain from making an armed intervention against the Assad regime, thus ending a very long period when British party leaders saw it as their duty to support American foreign policy objectives.

We now come to last year’s Commons vote on the recognition of the Palestinian state. It would have been easy and conventional for Ed Miliband to have allowed his MPs a free vote on such a controversial subject. Instead, he bravely led them into the ‘aye’ lobby. As over Syria, he won the decision in Parliament. He has not been given nearly enough credit for this. It is extremely unusual for opposition leaders to win votes in the House of Commons and Ed Miliband has made a habit of doing so.

Four brave interventions, each one taking on powerful establishment interests: the Murdoch newspaper empire, the corporate elite, the foreign policy establishment and pro-Israel lobby.

Most people will not agree with all these positions. But there is no doubting Mr Miliband’s integrity or his courage. And he needs these qualities because when you attack powerful interests they use all their influence to fight back.

The Murdoch press is now persecuting Mr Miliband. It is hyping up the attacks on him by big business, while mocking him in a personal way. Recently in a Westminster restaurant I saw a top News International henchman having lunch with David Cameron’s culture minister (and unofficial ambassador to the Murdoch press) Ed Vaizey. The alliance between the Murdoch press and the Tory party, knocked temporarily off course during the phone-hacking scandal, is back in business. Mr Murdoch has powerful allies in other newspaper groups who are desperate to avoid another brave commitment from Ed Miliband — his call for full implementation of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations on press regulation.

Meanwhile, corporate Britain is exacting its revenge on Mr Miliband because of his refusal to share the world view of big business. Donations to the Labour party have dried up, so much so that he will have difficulty financing his election campaign.

However, Tory coffers are full to bursting and much of this money is being used to vilify the Labour leader through questionable techniques of vile advertising imported from the United States.

Ed Miliband is paying his biggest price of all, however, for his bold stands on Syria and Palestine. Neoconservative opinion (still dominant in the Conservative party and the Blairite wing of Labour) dictates that Miliband should axiomatically have taken the side of Israel over Palestine and of armed intervention in the Syrian conflict.

The backlash hit him particularly hard because it split the Labour party. The allies of Tony Blair have struck back, with Blair himself having accidentally blurted out his doubts about Miliband to numerous journalists. It is notable that all the leading Blairite commentators in the media appear to support David Cameron over Ed Miliband.

During his four-year stint as Labour leader, Ed Miliband has shown courage and principle. His reward is to be trashed and ridiculed and he may yet be destroyed.

Opposition is an essential part of British public life. Oppositions have a duty to challenge government and to give the electorate a clear choice. Ed Miliband has done precisely this and yet he has been written off. Does this mean that no opposition dare offend the big vested interests that govern Britain? Is this really the politics we want?

But consider this: if Ed Miliband does become prime minister, he will have done so without owing anything to anybody.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9438172/ed-milibands-biggest-critics-dont-hate-him-for-how-hes-failed-they-hate-him-for-how-hes-succeeded/feed/214Ed Miliband's Speech To Scottish Labour Party ConferencefeaturedGods and fairytaleshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437342/paganism-is-alive-and-well-but-you-wont-find-it-at-a-goddess-temple/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437342/paganism-is-alive-and-well-but-you-wont-find-it-at-a-goddess-temple/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9437342The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this… Read more

]]>The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this revival is polite make-believe. Ragnar Hairybreeks or Harald Bluetooth would not seek planning permission before building a place of sacrifice. At Gamla Uppsala, the Viking temple site in Sweden, horses were hanged to please the gods in groups of nine from trees, along with cattle, sheep, and human beings. In Reykjavik today’s pagans still eat sacred horsemeat at their feasts, but they buy it in from caterers.

Respectable modern paganism is not only made up, as its leading ideologues cheerfully admit, but made up within a very limited compass of the modern Anglo-American imagination. The most obvious example is Wicca, invented almost entirely by a civil servant, Gerald Gardner, in the 1940s and 1950s, when he lived in Hampshire, although he claimed to have rediscovered a hidden tradition. But even in Scandinavia, where there are still some living elements of old unchristian beliefs, the pagan revival draws on English-speaking models. One self-conscious pagan group in Helsinki had to be told by a visiting sociologist that there was a native Finnish tradition of nature deities: until then they had just read Aleister Crowley.

The religious imagination has always been greedy and creative, stealing from every-thing around it. Look at the Qur’an and the Book of Mormon. The one thing that traditional religions have never done, though, is to be religious. Religion, as a special category of life, is a modern, Protestant invention. Real folk religions just seem like part of life. They aren’t about what people believe, but about what they know, and still more what they do. Elements of that kind of paganism do survive in Sweden: I have friends in Lapland who believe in an entirely unforced way that their farm is guarded by trolls, who are sometimes visible, mischievous but generally friendly. The distinguishing mark of this kind of paganism is that it is so normal and casual.

We know that there are 2,400 pagans in Iceland today because that’s the number who pay their church tax to a pagan organisation. But real, untidy beliefs don’t show up on tax returns, and they are not tidily separated from either religion or daily life. They seep up into the way we approach life and death. The Goddess Temple in Glastonbury has just announced it has become the first pagan temple in England licensed for heterosexual and same-sex weddings. But they are a tiny part of modern British paganism, and weddings are much less significant than funerals here.

This was first obvious in the frenzy around the death of Diana. The flowers and the stuffed toys piled into spontaneous shrines were nothing to do with Christianity or any other organised religion. The Church of England made some feeble effort to appropriate them, but it was obvious that if they did reveal a spiritual hunger, it was one already satisfied. More significant evidence comes from ordinary graves around the country and their bizarre iconography. Linda Woodhead, the leading sociologist of contemporary English religion, once photographed a grave on which there was no cross, just laminated pictures of the emblems of Tottenham Hotspur and Stella Artois, along with some lucky heather. Was that religious or secular, she asked, and concluded that the question makes no sense. It’s no use asking what beliefs these represent: like the flowers and teddy bears, they are just something that people do.

Paganism in this widespread general sense has an important lesson for Christianity. You hear it argued that liberal religion declined because it lets people believe anything, when in fact they want clear judgments. But there is lots of biblical teaching, from the condemnation of adultery to the duty of hospitality to asylum seekers, which the churches are very clear about and which simply makes them unpopular. What successful churches have is not demanding doctrine but demanding practices, rituals and observances which saturate everyday life. That’s what New Agery offers, with its crystals and cleansings. It’s what charismatic Christianity and folk Islam both provide. But the nearest approach to a widespread folk religion in this country is neither of these. Nor is it the paganism of the druids or the Pagan Federation. If you want to see mass rituals carried out purely for their own sake, and symbolism invoked on all the great occasions of life, it isn’t what goes on in Glastonbury. It’s bloody football.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437342/paganism-is-alive-and-well-but-you-wont-find-it-at-a-goddess-temple/feed/24127999486featuredSaint Joan and the treacherous phonehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436402/my-moment-of-mortification-with-saint-joan-collins/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436402/my-moment-of-mortification-with-saint-joan-collins/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9436402I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t… Read more

]]>I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t that fun to watch, it was really fun to make. We filmed it one autumn in someone’s stately home. I had a lovely fling with a woman in the art department, who, in order to hide the fling from friends of her faraway boyfriend, came up with the brilliant ruse of pretending to have a fling with the third assistant director to confuse everyone. At least that’s what she told me she was doing. I was definitely confused, but I believed her. It was years later that someone explained to me that she really was having a fling with the third assistant director.

But I never minded. She was so nice. And I was just so delighted to be working with Joan Collins. Charming, flirtatious, stylish, politically incorrect, iconic in her own lifetime, sharp as a proverbial pin, and enjoyably tactile. Forged during the Blitz, she’d survived being chatted up and predated on by everyone from J. Arthur Rank to Frank Sinatra. Now it was my turn.

She was very beautiful without her makeup on. I only saw that once. And I wasn’t supposed to. I was slumped in a chair on the make-up bus when Joan came in. It was 5 a.m. A candid time of day. Too early to hide. And somebody is scraping your hair back and painting out your liver spots. Gone was the smart-talking dominatrix, and in her place a pale, delicate, ironical girl. Girlish anyway. No grandeur. And disarmingly, no opinion of herself as an actress. As a star, yes, but not as an actress. Just a very famous woman of a certain age, hoping to survive the insanity of the director.

Halfway through filming, the finance collapsed. It turned out the whole thing was being paid for by spivs and nobody had been paid. The spivs turned up in a blue Bentley Turbo to try and stop the crew walking off. We had a sort of latter-day peasants’ revolt in the old hall of the house with an incensed Glaswegian first assistant director speaking on behalf of the crew. The shiny-suited spivs shifted their weight from foot to foot. Standoff.

Then Nigel Hawthorne, the star of the film and the kindest man in the room, spoke up. He spoke on behalf of Joan. Joan had a plan. Joan loved the film and loved everyone working on it, and was damned if she was going to see it go down. Joan was taking out a loan out against the value of her flat in Eaton Square to give the spivs time to sort out their cashflow problem. There was a stunned silence. Then a spontaneous cheer. The spivs looked down at their shoes like chastened schoolboys. This was magnificent. This was historic. And all in an ancient hall with halberds and a Minstrels Gallery. Suits of armour clattered their spurs and rattled their visors. She was our heroine: Saint Joan, Joan of Dynasty. Through her determination, her strength of character, and the considerable value of her super-prime Belgravia apartment, we were allowed to continue having our affairs for a few more weeks, before winter drew in and we returned to the our long-term relationships, and the reality of the film we’d all been making.

But there were a couple of lovely times to still to come. At Joan’s Christmas party I sat on her bed between Nanette Newman and Conrad Black and chatted to William Hague. There was a charming lunch for Nigel Hawthorne’s 70th birthday in a restaurant when I tried to kiss her for slightly too long on the back stairs. At some stage she very kindly invited me to come and stay with her that summer in St Tropez. I said I’d love to. But I hoped to swerve it. What would we talk about, really? And in truth, I was unsure about spending time with her immaculately presented boyfriend. He appeared to blow-dry his hair. We’ll call him Lance.

The summer arrived and we still hadn’t made a plan. I had however made a plan with some friends who had a house not far from hers, in the hills behind Grimaud. I mentioned that I was supposed to be making an arrangement with Joan but hadn’t got round to it. The two gay New Yorkers staying in the house spluttered into their margaritas. ‘Joan Collins!?? You’re kidding, oh my gawd sweetie, you have call her immediately!!’

‘Yes Tom,’ said our hostess solemnly, on behalf of hostesses everywhere, ‘You must call her — otherwise it’s very rude.’

‘Helloooo? Who is this?’ The voice was languid and treacherous. The voice Americans have in mind when they cast English people as villains.

‘Hello? Is that… er… Lance? It’s Tom…er…Tom Hollander.’

‘Yessss, what time is it?’

‘Oh um, what is it? 9.15 p.m.? Is that OK? Look I just wanted to say I’m staying up the road as it happens with Liam and Natasha. Yes! And though there’s probably no time now to take her up on the very generous offer to stay, because I’m staying here, um, I would really love to see you both. Is that OK? Is Joan there?’

‘Nooo. She gets back from LA tomorrow night. Why don’t you come for dinner on Thuursday, I’m sure she’d love to see youuu.’

‘Oooh, yes yes, thanks Lance, that would be lovely and as you know I’m really high-maintenance ho ho, and I expect a lot of fuss ha ha, so you’d better kill the fatted calf and everything ho ho!’

The next day I got a long voice message on my mobile. ‘Hi darling, it’s Joan here. I’ve just arrived in London from LA where I’ve been shooting The Flintstones 2 and I’m absolutely exhausted, but Lance tells me you’re coming to dinner on Thursday so that’s fantastic, can’t wait to see you, darling. Byee…’

And then something terrible happened. Something that everyone fears happening, but that never actually happens, happened. She didn’t hang up. Nope. She didn’t press the red button. She kept speaking to whoever was in the car with her: ‘Urgh. I hope he doesn’t come. Really. I’m so tired. I invited him to stay weeks ago and he never got back and now apparently he’s having a much more glamorous time up the road. Lance says yesterday he called, in the middle of the night, and demanded that we kill the fatted calf for him! I mean honestly. Anyway darling, nearly home. Look, I bought this from Bulgari to cheer myself up…’.

It stopped. She’d realised and hung up, or the phone had committed suicide, but either way: Alexis Carrington was back. And yes, she actually said the Bulgari thing.

I ranted by the pool: ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe it, what a total bitch — and Lance, that two-faced blowdried piece of shit. Right, I’m not going to dinner, I only rang to be polite, I didn’t even want to go in the first place. And what’s more I’m going to sell that voice message in the back of Private Eye. Like those recordings of Linda McCartney singing out of tune on “Hey Jude” that you used to get. I’ll probably be able to retire on the back of it. Does anyone know how to save a voicemail?’

No one did. What’s more, they all really badly wanted to meet Joan Collins.

So we all went to dinner at Joan’s bungalow in a people carrier. Joan was fabulous. Lance was smug. The New Yorkers were beside themselves. I sulked the whole evening. It was a huge success.

The years rolled by. Joan dumped Lance. Met dear Percy Gibson. That woman from the art department married her kind boyfriend.

A decade later, I was hiding in the corner of a restaurant in Toronto with some wine and a book. Joan came in with sweet Percy. I hadn’t seen her since the evening in St Tropez. She looked happy. She smiled warmly and opened her arms wide: ‘Tim, darling! How lovely! Percy, have you met Tim? We’ve got so much to talk about. You must come and have dinner some time.’

]]>Albert Square full of Thatcherites? You ’avin a larf? No, it’s true. EastEnders, conceived 30 years ago partly as a means of enraging the Conservative party, has blossomed into a Tory commercial.

Iain Duncan-Smith could watch all the wealth-creating activity in Albert Square with a syrupy smile; George Osborne could visit Phil Mitchell’s garage in a hi-vis jacket and look perfectly at home (Boris Johnson has already had a cameo pint at the Queen Vic). EastEnders portrays small businesses built up through hard work; it implies that turning to the state won’t get you anywhere; they even sent swotty teenager Libby Fox to Oxford. Never mind the affairs and addictions, the murders and rape, Walford is rammed full of aspirational, hard-working families. No wonder so many posh folk gather round the TV to enjoy it with their M&S fish pie.

Albert Square’s drift to the right appears to be unintentional. When the series began, at 7 p.m. on 19 February 1985, the real East End of London was a sumpland. Shoreditch was somewhere to inject drugs in doorways; Dalston was noted for its spectacular murder rate; the old London docks were dead. The opening episode angrily reflected all this. The body of a poor, elderly murder victim is found in a grimy flat; one of the men who discovers the body has been unemployed for months, and is on the brink of depression as a result. Later, in the very brown pub on the corner, where a fight between two snarling lager louts is taking place, an old woman in a charity-shop anorak complains that there is no such thing as community any more. As the production team stated in 1985, the series was set ‘uncompromisingly in Thatcher’s Britain’.

Quite so: and we might say that it is now set in the Britain Mrs Thatcher wanted. Look around today’s Albert Square: no one is on benefits. No one! Among the young characters, Jay and Ben work in the Arches garage, Lee and Nancy in the Queen Vic, Tamwar in the market inspector’s office; Whitney is a teaching assistant; Shabnam is there all hours at the Minute Mart; and young Peter Beale is up before dawn to work the veg stall that has been in his family for generations. At the other end of the age scale, Dot Cotton is still working shifts at the launderette. She is 87.

Funnily enough, Dot is the sole council tenant left on the Square; the rest is owner-occupied and tarted up. Ian Beale’s lavender wallpaper might not be Osborne and Little, but Albert Square’s canniest businessman has more important things to think about. In 1985, Ian was a 16-year-old with bigger dreams than his barrow-boy father; over the years, he has started a café, a fish-and-chip shop and a swanky restaurant. He is also a buy-to-let landlord. In the earliest years, his acumen was portrayed as abnormal and amoral. Now it is accepted by all the other characters as perfectly natural; how else are livings made?

Entrepreneurship abounds. Beastly Dean Wicks owns and runs the Square’s natty hairdressing business. Its premises were once occupied by adventuress Janine Butcher who, between murders, was a high-flying estate agent. At the other end of the Square, when Tanya Branning tired of her husband’s infidelities, she decided to earn her own way with a beauty parlour called Bootys. The moral? Starting a business is the path to fulfilment, whatever the state of your moral compass.

And when disaster strikes, it’s no use crying to the nanny state. Think of Alfie and Kat Moon. In a recent episode, a chilly official told them the only way they could get a council house was to move to Luton. In EastEnders terms, that’s transportation. They have been taken in by friends, Big Society-style.

And there are handsome earnings to be made in Albert Square. Phil Mitchell’s empire — stretching from the Arches garage to the Albert cocktail bar — is so profitable that he has a spare £100,000 knocking around in his safe (or did, until cousin Ronnie nabbed it). Meanwhile, his other cousin Roxy owns the local gym. Across the way, Max Branning’s sex addiction does not get in the way of his little earner, ‘Deals On Wheels’, a used-car concern that keeps a very nice roof over the heads of his daughters. Nor will you ever hear the term ‘tax credits’ used in the Vic; even shivering market traders Kush and Kat don’t fall back on the Treasury when the takings have been slim. Kat’s leopard-print dresses, shuddering on their railings, are all that lie between her and destitution. But will she accept handouts? No, indeed she will not.

EastEnders, in its efforts to reflect the real world, has unconsciously embraced the Tory vision. As a microcosm of Britain, Albert Square is a blend of self-reliance, fierce localism and community cohesion. If Cameron had any sense, he’d make it the cornerstone of his election campaign.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436492/eastenders-wanted-to-show-thatchers-britain-these-days-it-would-make-maggie-proud/feed/15Steve McFaddenfeaturedThe trouble with Kids Companyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437932/the-trouble-with-kids-company/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437932/the-trouble-with-kids-company/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9437932In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should… Read more

]]>In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social activist Camila Batmanghelidjh.

She was the perfect lodestar for the young Tory leader. She began her drop-in centre — the Kids Company — in 1996 and within a few years, was helping thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children. She’s colourful, powerful but also a former Sherborne girl with whom Cameron and other members of the establishment felt at ease. Cameron told his shadow ministers that Camila embodied the Big Society. He suggested they study her work and design policies that reflected it.

The cash has rolled in to Kids Company. It has received more than £25 million from the government, and another £4.25 million has just been agreed. Prince Charles is a fan; the rock group Coldplay have donated £8 million. Then there’s Richard Branson, J.K. Rowling, Jemima Khan, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, John Lewis and more.

Good for Camila Batmanghelidjh, you might say, but there are a number who believe that Kids Company has perhaps grown too quickly and would, despite its undoubted achievements, benefit from a review of its operations and controls. They worry that Kids Company has become too famous, untouchable, and now acts as a drain on well-meaning donations that might otherwise go to better causes. Having investigated the charity for several months, I’m afraid I agree.

I first became interested in Kids Company after meeting and writing about a recent benefactor of theirs, Joan Woolard, who sold her house just over a year ago so as to give the proceeds to Kids Company. Less than a year after making her enormous donation, of about £200,000, she became so disillusioned that she complained to the Charity Commission and is demanding back her money. I wrote about Mrs Woolard, a 76-year-old widow from Lincolnshire, for the Oldie magazine. My piece covered her wider life, which included working as a Labour MP’s secretary. But one observation I made was this: ‘What is perhaps most bizarre about this tale is that Joan has no idea what has become of her money. The charity has never informed her how it has been or will be used, despite her being its largest individual donor.’

Ms Batmanghelidjh does not take criticism on the chin. She wrote to the then Oldie editor Richard Ingrams insisting he ‘repair’ the ‘incredibly damaging narrative’. She stated Kids Company had ‘worked very carefully’ with Joan for more than a year before accepting the donation.

Is that right? Not according to Mrs Woolard: ‘Contrary to what she claims, I never received a personal letter from Camila thanking me for making my donation. I had a few meetings with her in the 15 months before I made my donation but it’s not correct to say I “worked” with her.’

So much for hurt feelings — more interesting are Joan’s other misgivings. After the Oldie spat, by way of making up, Joan spent a week volunteering at Kids Company, to see how donations were spent.

One of its therapy centres she attended was the Morgan Stanley Heart Yard in south London. It was bought with £1.6 million given by the London arm of the American investment bank after which it was named and opened by Joanna Lumley. What struck Mrs Woolard was the absence of children. She says: ‘Camila said that the charity is “short of money” because summer is a busy time because so many more children need to be fed and looked after during the school holidays. But I was told by staff that during the summer holidays there are fewer children to look after. I can’t square this fundamental contradiction.’

Nor, as it happens can some other former senior members of Kids Company, who claim that there are ‘exaggerations’ in the numbers of people it says it helps. In the charity’s annual reports, the numbers increased from 13,500 in 2008 to 16,500 in 2010 before jumping to an astonishing 36,000 the next year. That figure of 36,000 has been used in Kids Company literature ever since, but some ex-staff members have questioned it. In response to this, the charity stated it uses a computer system tracking all the children, young people and families with which it works, recording why money was spent on them and what outcome arose, and that the earlier figures were under-estimates.

This all sounds very professional, but it turns out it is not just children who are included in the much-touted 36,000. In an email to me the charity wrote: ‘When we refer to clients they include children, young people, young adults with special needs, carers, i.e. foster parents or parents who predominantly have mental health difficulties, and school staff.’ Strange to include parents and school staff in the number of those helped.

On to Joan’s next concern, which she heard from staff in Kids Company HQ. Some employees are former ‘clients’ — people helped by the charity itself when younger — and the complaint from regular staff was that some of these former clients did not bother turning up to work. Joan told me: ‘One girl had apparently swanned off for the whole summer, to the obvious annoyance of colleagues. I was also told that others who visit the charity are given cash allowances to supplement their Jobseekers’ Allowances and to prevent them from stealing or dealing drugs. I don’t think private donors or the government give Kids Company money so that it can be handed out to young people in cash?’

When I put this to Ms Batmanghelidjh, she said: ‘Money is only spent on the most destitute of our clients.’ She said this included ‘trafficked mothers’ unable to access welfare despite having children born in the UK, and young people in education who ‘receive food vouchers and a bus pass’. She said: ‘I want to be very clear that at no time have we paid or do we pay clients to come to us.’

However, I’ve spoken to former Kids Company employees who might disagree. I’ve also spoken to a former Kids Company member of staff, Genevieve Maitland Hudson, who left the charity in 2009. She told me that young people were given cash and travel cards. She said: ‘On Fridays in 2008, little packages of cash were handed out to every young person through a window in the Urban Academy reception. It was always tense. There were tears. There was shouting. There were threats. There were fights.’ What prompted Genevieve to leave Kids Company was not the challenging work and certainly not the young people, about whom she has only good things to say, but the ‘culture’ of the charity.

Finally, last August — six weeks after it was promised — Joan Woolard received the report setting out where her money had gone. It had been overseen and written off personally by Ms Batmanghelidjh. But instead of allaying the widow’s concerns, it only increased them. Five of its 11 pages were simply photographs of children. Within the text were three boxes referring to what her money had bought. This included the claim that £44,181 of her donation went on ‘the entirety of our food budget at Kenbury [one of its London centres] between September and December 2013’.

Mrs Woolard found this odd. A Kids Company report produced for the government — covering the period 2011 to 2013 — had stated: ‘In the past year, £174,379 was spent providing meals at four of our centres’ — including Kenbury. This suggested that the average monthly budget for each of the four centres was only £3,600. Yet according to the report given to Mrs Woolard, the monthly average for Kenbury during the period her money was spent on food there was £11,045 — three times higher. The charity says it’s confident about its figures.

Its special report for Mrs Woolard stated that Kids Company fed ‘approximately 3,000 children each week’. An article in the Evening Standard last October also stated that the Kenbury Street centre serves 3,000 hot meals each week.

The figures are confusing. Are 450 youngsters being fed a meal there daily — a total of 3,000 meals a week? Or are 3,000 youngsters getting one meal there each per week? Mrs Woolard tried to find out by visiting the Kenbury Street centre unannounced. She estimated that the dining space had enough room for 60 people at any one time. To serve 3,000 meals per week would require seven separate sittings per day, seven days a week. She feels these numbers just do not add up.

Camila Batmanghelidjh dismissed my concerns about the treatment of Mrs Woolard, saying in email: ‘We have been concerned about Joan Woolard and her mental health. A few months back we discussed our concerns with the Charity Commission and placed the evidence with them.’ Quite apart from the distasteful nature of the accusation, and the fact that I found Joan Woolard to be perfectly sane, the question remains: if Kids Company really thinks Joan Woolard might be mentally unwell, doesn’t it have a duty to return her £200,000?

Camila Batmanghelidjh claims that Kids Company has an open-door policy, and she invited me to spend time there, as Mrs Woolard had. I daresay I’d be charmed by Camila, as so many others have been. But I’m not sure a casual day-long visit is the solution for Kids Company. Like other charities in receipt of vast sums of taxpayers’ money, it needs to be able to demonstrate to donors — and the outside world — that the money is being used as well as possible, however worthy the objectives. If a government department, say, or a donor like Joan Woolard or a former staff member has concerns about a charity, they must be properly addressed.

Charm is no substitute for transparency. Or at least it ought not to be. Officials in the Department for Education, for instance, were so unimpressed by Kids Company’s financial management that they persuaded ministers to stop millions in funding. Ms Batmanghelidhjh’s response was to contact the Prime Minister, who personally intervened with the Department for Education to make sure Kids Company got its cash. Not a word of the argument leaked.

Who can blame Camila for fighting for her charity? But this sequence of events exemplifies the problem: if you’re too well connected for anyone to criticise you, if you’re always pulling strings, you risk losing transparency and therefore accountability — however well intentioned you are.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437932/the-trouble-with-kids-company/feed/153childrensfeaturedInvestment: Build your own pensionhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436092/five-questions-to-help-you-take-control-of-your-pension/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436092/five-questions-to-help-you-take-control-of-your-pension/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9436092If you want something done properly, it often pays to do it yourself. So it must be good news that as of 6 April, when George Osborne’s pension reforms take… Read more

]]>If you want something done properly, it often pays to do it yourself. So it must be good news that as of 6 April, when George Osborne’s pension reforms take effect, it will be easier than ever to run your own pension fund, because you won’t be forced to retire as an investor when you cease to work for a living. Instead, everyone — not just the rich — will be allowed to retain ownership of their life savings and try to live off them by means of what is known in the jargon as ‘income drawdown’.

But is a DIY pension right for you? Institutional funds are buying government bonds with both hands — despite prices hitting record highs and yields falling to historic lows. This could be a recipe for future disappointment for individual savers, depending on what happens next.

Here and now, the important thing is that self-invested personal pensions (Sipps) can enable everyone — including members of occupational schemes (a pension linked to your job) — to choose our own stores of value to fund retirement, including shares, bonds, cash, property and gold.

However, more choices — created by the imminent abolition of any compulsion to buy an annuity, or guaranteed income for life — also means more ways to make mistakes. Here are six questions to consider before deciding whether to risk your life savings in George Osborne’s retirement revolution.

What have you got?

If you are a member of company pension scheme — or have the right to join one — where your employer makes contributions to the fund, failing to take this benefit amounts to volunteering for a pay cut. This might sound obvious but millions do just that.

Similarly, if your occupational scheme is set up as a defined-benefit or final-salary fund — check the annual statement — then you should hang on to it as a low-risk way to fund retirement. You won’t need to worry about investment returns or annuity yields. The only exception would be where you fear your employer might go bust or default on its pension promises.

Most private-sector schemes — including all personal plans — switched to a defined contribution or money purchase basis years ago. However, it’s worth noting that everyone — including members of both types of occupational pension — has been allowed to also contribute to Sipps for nearly a decade. So sticking with the firm or going DIY is not an either/or choice; you can do both.

How can you tell whether returns are adequate?

If you read the annual statement all pension funds must issue — and that single act will make you better informed than many members of a newspaper scheme where I used to be a trustee — you will see total returns, usually shown on a calendar year basis. You can compare these with the relevant stock market index or fund performance figures available free online from independent statisticians including Bloomberg, Morningstar and Trustnet. Try not to focus on just one year’s returns and consider at least five years; the longer the better. Also, make sure you compare like with like. Most pensions are managed funds — or a mixture of shares, bonds and property — which is likely to produce lower volatility and returns than pure equity strategies based on the FTSE All-Share or other global indices. Finally, remember that your employer may well pay the company scheme’s costs, but is unlikely to do so for a Sipp.

What will it cost to run your own retirement fund?

There is no initial charge to set up a simple Sipp with many providers, including Alliance Trust, Fidelity, Hargreaves Lansdown, James Hay and Zurich. After that, annual charges might be determined in cash terms — up to £275 at Alliance or £200 for Prudential’s fund Sipp — or a percentage of the assets under management — such as up to 0.35 per cent at Fidelity or 0.45 per cent at Hargreaves.

However, these figures give only an outline of the total cost of running your own retirement fund. This will be determined by which assets you hold and how often you buy or sell. For example, Hargreaves Lansdown charges frequent traders as little as £5.95 to deal online in equities — including overseas shares. It also places a cap of £200 a year on annual fees for Sipps holding shares — including investment trusts — while there is no maximum limit on annual charges for unit trusts or open-ended investment companies. That makes shares much cheaper to hold than funds for bigger pensions.

You can see more details about a comprehensive variety of Sipps in Money Management’s special survey of April 2014, or go online to InvestmentSense.

How much do you need to get started with a DIY Sipp?

Many providers set low or no minimum initial investment to start a simple Sipp, holding mainstream assets — such as shares, bonds, cash or funds — without financial advice. This is may be the best option for most people who feel able to run their own retirement fund.

Alliance Trust — where I used to be a client before Scottish nationalism forced me south of the border — sets the bar at £50. Aviva — another provider I left, due to baffling paperwork — and Fidelity require £1,000. Hargreaves Lansdown — where I am currently a happy client — has no initial investment minimum.

If you want to hold more exotic assets — such as hedge funds, overseas currencies, agricultural land and gold — expect higher minimum investment limits, such as the £50,000 required by Barnett Waddingham.

Where can you get help?

You don’t need to go completely DIY when deciding what to buy or sell in your Sipp. In addition to many of the companies named above, wealth managers including Brewin Dolphin, Charles Stanley and Killik offer various degrees of advice and managed Sipps. As you would expect, the latter option costs more. For example, Charles Stanley’s annual management charge is £250 for a basic administered Sipp or £550 for a wider range of assets — including property — and fees range between 0.5 per cent and 1.25 per cent.

What is your pain threshold?

It is important to be aware that DIY pensions or Sipps will not suit everyone. When share prices fall and your pension shrinks you will not be able to blame some City suit: the idiot responsible will be staring back at you in the mirror every morning.

While people still at work can take the long view of such setbacks, it will be more difficult for pensioners who are investing irreplaceable capital. That is why many people entering retirement should continue to buy annuities.

But the fundamental appeal of Osborne’s revolutionary idea — or ‘pensions for the people’ — is that it gives us freedom to choose how we manage and spend our life savings. I enjoy several hours a week doing so. That’s less than many people devote to following a football team and a lot more rewarding.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436092/five-questions-to-help-you-take-control-of-your-pension/feed/0piggybankfeaturedInvestment: Pump it uphttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436252/as-oil-prices-plunge-i-want-to-profit-from-the-next-spike-heres-how/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436252/as-oil-prices-plunge-i-want-to-profit-from-the-next-spike-heres-how/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9436252Buy jerry cans and fill them while you can. You won’t want to be caught out by the great oil shortage of 2016. Maybe that is exaggerating a little, but… Read more

]]>Buy jerry cans and fill them while you can. You won’t want to be caught out by the great oil shortage of 2016. Maybe that is exaggerating a little, but when you start hearing people talking about the world being ‘awash’ with oil, and read of oil companies slashing exploration and towing rigs to be laid up in the Moray Firth, you have to wonder if an oil crunch can be far behind. Someone is going to make a fortune when the balance between supply and demand flips and prices rocket again.

It is easy to fancy that it could be you. But being a contrarian doesn’t always work out. Only misery awaited those who thought that when bank shares halved at the end of 2007 it must be a great buying opportunity. I would love to say I wasn’t one of them. It is not much consolation to be able to say you only lost 90 per cent of your money, while those who bought at the peak lost 95 per cent.

So is now the time to make a fortune from a depressed oil industry, and how do you do it? It is so often the same for small investors. You vaguely know what you want to do, which is to buy some oil at today’s price in the hope that you can sell next year at a higher price. But how do you get your hands on oil futures?

You can do so via things called Exchange Traded Funds, which invest in oil futures for you. You can certainly make money when the price spikes. Had you put $100 in the ETFS Commodities Securities Crude Oil fund in 2007, for example, you would have had $200 a year later. But a year after that you would have been down to $50, and now you would have $30. What’s more, you wouldn’t have had a cent of income to show for it. In fact, oil futures pay a negative income. ‘It costs a lot of money to keep rolling over derivatives,’ says Laith Khalif of Hargreaves Lansdown. ‘Even if oil prices are going up you might not make that much money.’

At least your BP shares are still yielding 5 per cent, even if they are down 20 per cent in a year. Shares in oil services firm Petrofac are yielding even more, at nearly 7 per cent. Either of those dividends might be trimmed, of course. But then again, they could rise if oil prices rebound.

All this turns on a premise which might prove false. What if crude oil prices plunge further, say to $20 a barrel? It is not impossible. The plummet in oil prices at the beginning of December was precipitated by the decision of Opec, which usually cuts production when prices fall, to keep the taps open. It is doing so because it no longer has global dominance in oil production, now that shale production has made the US self-sufficient in oil. If Opec slashes output, the price will not respond rapidly as it did in the past. And there is every reason why Opec might want prices to keep falling. Shale oil production is on tighter margins than drilling in the Middle East. As prices fall, Canadian tar sands producers will be knocked out first, followed by US shale producers and the North Sea. Low oil prices hurt Opec producers, but they will eliminate some of the opposition.

Although the crude oil price has halved since last June, we are only just about getting to the stage where it starts to get interesting. At $50 a barrel, analysts Wood Mackenzie calculate that just 0.2 per cent of current world oil production is making a loss. At $40 a barrel (it was $46 last week), it’s 1.6 per cent who lose money.

So if the price stays above $40, oil production is likely to remain where it is. If it falls below $40 for a short period, most production will continue, because the decommissioning costs are quite high. But if it falls below $40 for a prolonged period it is going to take out a substantial chunk. At the same time, a sustained low price supercharges demand for oil, as gas-guzzlers and oil-fired boilers start to look like attractive options again. The oil market has always had spikes and troughs and no doubt always will.

So you are convinced that the slump in oil prices will rebound and want to strike a metaphorical gusher? If shares aren’t your thing and oil futures are a bit inaccessible, there is always another option. You can find on eBay a 20-year-old, 30,000-litre oil tanker for £4,900. Fill it with unleaded at £1.05 per litre and, should the price of petrol rebound to £1.40, your £31,500 investment will have grown to £42,000.

You had better check with the neighbours first, though. And HMRC: there might be some tax implications if you start flogging to friends and passers-by. Oh, and health and safety. It isn’t just the oil price which is volatile; so is the real thing. You don’t want to risk the wrong kind of boom.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436252/as-oil-prices-plunge-i-want-to-profit-from-the-next-spike-heres-how/feed/1478242459featuredInvestment: Euro starshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436292/worry-about-the-eurozone-crisis-if-you-like-but-profit-too/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436292/worry-about-the-eurozone-crisis-if-you-like-but-profit-too/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9436292If you want something to worry about, you need only cast your eye across the channel to find yourself spoilt for choice. There is the background noise of massive unrepayable… Read more

]]>If you want something to worry about, you need only cast your eye across the channel to find yourself spoilt for choice. There is the background noise of massive unrepayable sovereign debt levels. There’s huge youth unemployment. There are angry minority political parties — note the rise of Spain’s anti-austerity party Podemos. There is the battle between those who think the eurozone can survive as just a monetary union and those who know that it will only survive if it gives into political union.

There is the threat of deflation (nice when you aren’t in debt, crippling when you are). There is the new phenomenon of negative yields, whereby desperate investors are prepared to pay more for sovereign bonds (and the occasional corporate bond) than they know it is possible to get back if they hold the bond to maturity. Yields on more than $3 trillion worth of sovereign debt are already negative.

And of course there is brinkmanship in Greece, with the odds of a Greek departure from the euro by the end of the year getting better and better every day and Russia prepared to consider backing the country’s rebellious new government if the rest of the EU won’t. It’s a mess. And if the Greeks don’t start being nice to the Germans soon (or visa versa) it’s going to turn into more of a mess.

But all this confusion and chaos has done one good thing. It has made global investors confuse stock markets with economies and overlook the strength of many of Europe’s companies, big and small. And it has made those companies much cheaper to buy than they would have been otherwise. The first thing to note here is that the eurozone economies, while not exactly at their best, are also not in as dismal a shape as you might think: most manufacturing surveys are telling us activity is on the up; consumption is rising slightly; and the economic surprise index (which tells you how reality differs from forecasts) has turned positive.

The second thing to note is that how much the economy does or doesn’t grow from here is neither here nor there for the stock market. Academics have passed countless well-paid hours investigating the link between economic growth and stock market returns. Their final conclusion? There isn’t one. Instead stock market returns are a function of two things. In the short term it is liquidity — how much money there is knocking around to buy shares. And in the long term it is valuations: buy them when they are cheap and you’ll make money over the medium to long term; buy them when they are expensive and mostly you won’t.

So on to liquidity. Obviously, here there is little but good news. The ECB’s quantitative easing programme, announced in January, appears to be the real deal, so we can soon expect to see a huge amount of new money poured into the market to spread its fairy dust around the asset classes. But according to the liquidity specialist Cross Border Capital, there is other good news too: eurozone private-sector liquidity is also ‘fast increasing’ and was doing so even before the QE announcement. Their conclusion? ‘The eurozone is already in recovery from a flow of funds standpoint.’

If history is any guide, that should mean that asset prices recover too. That is particularly the case if you look at yields (if a bond is yielding zero, a share doesn’t have to give much to look good) and at valuations. Analysts are prone to a mild fixation on price/earnings ratios. Look at these for most European markets and you might not think they look that cheap. But short-term p/e ratios are to markets as economic growth rates are to markets: mostly irrelevant. More relevant is the cyclically adjusted p/e ratio (Cape) developed by the Nobel-winning economist Robert Shiller in the early 1980s. You can find out exactly how Cape is calculated on the internet in a matter of seconds, so here I will just point out that it has a very good record of predicting long-term market returns and that today it is telling us to buy into European equities. According to Luca Paolini at Pictet Asset Management, if you look at the difference in Cape between the US and Europe as a whole, ‘European equities trade at a record discount of some 33 per cent versus US stocks.’ And that’s at a time when the weak euro is doing wonderful things for German exporters and the strong dollar is beginning to hurt US exporters.

I was lucky enough to interview Shiller himself last week. I asked him how confident he was in the measure: would he be happy buying, say, the four lowest Cape markets in Europe and holding them for ten years? I have to report that he wasn’t entirely certain that he could bring himself to put his own pension into the cheapest market out there — Greece, on a Cape of 3.4 times (the US is on around 27.8 times). But he is tempted by the slightly less bonkers markets: their ‘long history of greatness’ has prompted him to buy into Spain (10.7 times) and Italy (8.5 times) on the cheap. You could do worse than to follow him. You can do so with a simple exchange traded fund that just tracks the market as a whole or with a more expensive actively managed fund (perhaps Jupiter European Opportunities).

Otherwise you could buy a new fund which Shiller has worked with Barclays and asset-management firm Ossiam to produce, currently known as the Ossiam Shiller Barclays Europe Sector Value TR UCITS ETF 1C. The idea here is to use the Cape ratio to identify, buy and hold the cheapest sectors in the market, something back-testing suggests returns some five percentage points a year higher than those you would get from just tracking the wider index. The fund will be listed in a week (16 February), by which time I assume the parties involved will have thought of a less stupid name for it.

Or else if you really want to own a holiday home in Europe, you might want to get on the phone to a friendly estate agent. I can’t see why you would: hotels and villa rentals are convenient, easy, and unlikely to hit you with annual property or wealth taxes. But if you must, the cheap euro and the fact that sharp rises in liquidity usually find their way into the property market one way or another both make now a perfectly reasonable time to buy.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9436292/worry-about-the-eurozone-crisis-if-you-like-but-profit-too/feed/2187474778featuredFezhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9436892/a-walk-through-fez-is-the-closest-thing-to-visiting-ancient-rome/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9436892/a-walk-through-fez-is-the-closest-thing-to-visiting-ancient-rome/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9436892Fez is one of the seven medieval wonders of the world. An intact Islamic city defined by its circuit of battlemented walls, it is riven by alleyways. You pass doorways… Read more

]]>Fez is one of the seven medieval wonders of the world. An intact Islamic city defined by its circuit of battlemented walls, it is riven by alleyways. You pass doorways that look into a 10th-century mosque, then a workshop courtyard, before coming through a teeming covered market and twisting past the high walls of a reclusive garden palace. The aesthetic highlight of any visit will be the teaching colleges built in the 14th century by the Merenid Sultans, and nothing can quite prepare you for the colours and odours of the open-air tanneries or the drama of listening to the dusk call to prayer from the ruins of the Merenid tombs.

To the north of the city rise the slopes of Jebel Zalagh, dotted with olive orchards. These warn of the Rif mountains beyond, a tough region that continues all the way to the Mediterranean shore. To the south, further from the walls, is the immense plateau of the Middle Atlas, where forests of cedar and holm oak are interspersed with nomadic grazing grounds. Standing between these two historic lodestones of Moroccan identity, Fez has always functioned as the fortress city that guarded the eastern approaches of Morocco — the Taza gap. But its chief claim to fame within North Africa is as the ancient intellectual centre of Morocco: the Arabic-speaking university town which for 1,300 years pumped the literate culture of Islam into the Berber body of the nation.

For the visitor, Fez offers up extremes by the hour, be it the beggar in supplication beside the chilled calm of a palatial riad hotel or the mad cacophony of hammer blows from the metalworkers’ market next to the cloistered calm of the mosque. The alleyways can be packed not just with crocodiles of tourists but with veiled Moroccan ladies shopping for their Friday lunch, mules laden with pungent skins on a fast trot downhill, and streams of exuberant kids pouring out of school. I know of an eminent historian who advises a walk through Fez as the best way to understand the reality of ancient Rome.

Most tourists come as part of a cultural coach tour and pack in too much, too quickly. But there is another way. Once a year Fez opens its doors to the Sacred Music Festival, which for the past 20 years has colonised the city during the last week of May. Open-air theatres and concert halls are constructed by framing a 13th-century gateway or building platforms in 19th-century walled gardens. And like a returning vision of the city’s intellectual golden age, scholars, musicians, poets and mystics are invited back to grace this city of ancient culture.

If, incidentally, you are wondering about the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World, don’t bother consulting the web, which will unaccountably list such prehistoric wonders as Stonehenge and classical wonders as the Colosseum. Byzantine Hagia Sophia, the Great Wall of China, Mameluke Cairo, Lalibella in Ethiopia, Fez of the Merenids, Angkor Wat and Florence must be pretty sure of a place. The seventh is more contentious, but Ely, Cologne, Cordoba, Winchester, Notre Dame, Durham, Chartres and Damascus must surely be among the leading -candidates.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9436892/a-walk-through-fez-is-the-closest-thing-to-visiting-ancient-rome/feed/3fezfeaturedRise of the new young puritanshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432602/the-march-of-the-new-political-correctness/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432602/the-march-of-the-new-political-correctness/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9432602I wonder how many of you know that you’re cis. Not very many, I’m guessing. So let me break this gently. You are almost certainly cis. It is short for… Read more

Listen

I wonder how many of you know that you’re cis. Not very many, I’m guessing. So let me break this gently. You are almost certainly cis. It is short for ‘cisgendered’, which means that you ‘identify’ with the gender you were assigned at birth. To put it in everyday language, you were born male and are still male, or were born female and are still female.

Roughly 99.7 per cent of human beings — including gays, lesbians and bisexuals — are cisgender. The rest are transgender (‘trans’), which includes transvestites and trans-sexuals. The latter have had a sex-change operation. Incidentally, male-to-female ops greatly outnumber the female-to-male variety. As a distinguished Australian gynaecologist once told me: ‘You can make a hole but you can’t make a pole.’

Fortunately he didn’t say it online or he’d have been sacked the next day. The trans lobby is noisy and thin-skinned even by the standards of Twitter, though its emergence pre-dates social media.

In the 1980s ‘LGB’ replaced ‘gay community’ as the approved term for non-heterosexuals. In the 1990s the T was added and it stuck. Which wasn’t a bad thing. Transsexual people have a hard time and my own attitudes changed after meeting two dazzlingly bright trans women. One was so convincing that my jaw hit the floor when I was told she was born a man. The other, less so. But I think of them both as women and happily refer to them as ‘she’.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the cause of trans rights has been appropriated by the internet’s language police, who lurk in the slip roads of the digital highway, looking for any excuse to let off their sirens. Although most of the enforcers are themselves simply male or female, they find trans-related arguments irresistible because it’s so easy to catch people out. ‘Gender identity’ is a minefield. Woe betide anyone who — having patiently mastered the racial nomenclature that tripped up Benedict Cumberbatch — mixes up the queer and genderqueer communities.

Sirens go off all the time, as you can imagine — but now they’re all screaming at once, thanks to an article by the journalist Jonathan Chait that appeared in New York magazine the other week. In it, Chait argued that ‘large segments of American culture have convulsed into censoriousness’ — and what he says of America is increasingly true over here, too: ‘At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions”, small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first PC movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviours as full-scale offences.’

This hypersensitivity is now so common, said Chait, that it feels as if we’ve all lurched back to 1991. With one lethal difference: in the social media age, everyday chatter can be policed as sternly as academic discourse.

If Chait had been a conservative, no one would have paid any attention. But he’s a liberal who wants climate sceptics banned from public office. So by attacking political correctness — and even indulging in a little light mockery of ‘mansplaining’, ‘straightsplaining’ and other neologisms — he showed himself a traitor.

The reaction was comedy gold. Accused of hypersensitivity, the gender vigilantes shrieked their tits off. (That’s a figure of speech, by the way, not intended to exclude people without breasts.) ‘First things first,’ wrote Vox magazine’s Amanda Taub. ‘There’s no such thing as “political correctness”.’ She then launched into a virtuoso display of this thing that doesn’t exist. Chait was endangering marginalised groups by ‘shutting down the conversation’ — a ludicrous charge, given that Taub’s ideological soulmates on both sides of the Atlantic have always specialised in shutting down conversations.

In the first wave of political correctness, the word ‘inappropriate’ was enough to shame a speaker into silence. The new, digitally remastered PC draws on an ever-expanding lexicon of victimhood. Terf stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminism — i.e. ‘transphobic’ feminists. Swerfs are sex worker-exclusionary radical feminists who think prostitution oppresses women.

For right-wing pundits, these antics are a gift — fresh ammunition for the culture war. For more thoughtful British and American writers, such as the young conservative journalist Robert Wargas, the revived PC is frustrating and creepy. ‘People must understand that PC works like a conspiracy theory,’ he says. ‘The more vigorously you argue against it, the more its proponents see the need to affirm it. That’s because, under their rules, logic and free speech are tools of oppression, at least when used by non-favoured groups. They’ve created this perfectly circular, perfectly sealed universe, packed with bizarre terms and theories that explain why they’re always good and their opponents always evil. By definition, reason will not work against this. PC is like a church whose only sacrament is excommunication.’

The religious analogy is a good one. American intellectual life owes as much to the Pilgrim Fathers as to Jeffersonian democracy. Early New England is a unique example of an English-speaking theocracy. Towns and villages were ruled by Puritan language police. Anxiety about ‘right thinking’ continued long after the fragmentation of belief: as late as the 1920s, H.L. Mencken complained that American culture couldn’t rid itself of ‘the multiplication of taboos’. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the political correctness which now plagues both Britain and America crept out of Ivy League universities founded by religious zealots.

Outside academia, PC became entangled with identity politics, which in turn influenced the ‘tribes’ created by mass entertainment. Then along came the internet, which provided limitless opportunities for play-acting and offence-taking. These days even the most infantile subcultures pontificate about gender identity. ‘Bronies’ — adult fans of My Little Pony, most of them gay men — argue viciously over the ‘queering’ of their dolls. Last year the depiction of women in computer games provoked an infinitely tedious dispute known as Gamergate, in which feminists were joined by — and swiftly fell out with — trans activists. The gap between Smurfs and terfs is narrowing all the time.

It’s tempting to quote the old line about high-table feuds: passions run high because so little is at stake. That’s unfair to transsexuals and transvestites, who really do get bullied and beaten up. On the other hand, the scale of the rhetorical fury over these issues is out of all proportion to the size of the ‘trans community’ — 0.3 per cent of the population — and it’s worth pointing out that this hysterical finger-pointing has done nothing to address fundamental inequalities.

PC wordplay, computer games and street theatre are more about feeling good about yourself and guilt-tripping your opponents than eradicating poverty; forcing a British actor to grovel because he let slip the word ‘coloured’ does nothing to alter the fact that the United States, headquarters of the language police, remains one of the most racially and economically segregated societies in the world. Jonathan Chait had the temerity to point this out, and as a result the PC mob went online to do one of the things they do best: witch-hunting.

The original political correctness never quite took hold over here, but that was before Twitter and Facebook. This time round Britain has its own language monitors who embrace the notion that you should ‘check your privilege’ — that is, determine whether you have the ‘right’ to comment on a subject — before you say anything. They may not be quite as fluent in PC-speak as Americans, but they have popularised the notion that offence is identical with harm. To quote a young woman friend of mine, ‘Part of the way they do this is to stretch concepts like rape and sexual assault to encompass things we all once thought were minor aggravations — like being winked at or something.’

One hopes that the British sense of the ridiculous, our relish in piss-taking, will keep terms such as swerf out of our vocabulary. But the mindset that created them is slowly becoming more entrenched. Just this week, the feminist comic Kate Smurthwaite was forced to cancel a gig at Goldsmiths, London University, because she’d been threatened by women activists who disagreed with her ‘disrespectful’ views on sex workers. Goldsmiths, with the trademark gutlessness of all London University colleges, supported the cancellation. The irony is that Smurthwaite didn’t plan to mention prostitution: her subject for the evening was to have been free speech.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432602/the-march-of-the-new-political-correctness/feed/129pfeaturedThe new PC from A to Zhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432672/an-a-to-z-of-the-new-pc/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432672/an-a-to-z-of-the-new-pc/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9432672Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad ideas from the late 1980s and 1990s, should think again.… Read more

Listen

Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad ideas from the late 1980s and 1990s, should think again. When even someone as gay-friendly and Guardian-hued as Benedict Cumberbatch can be hounded for incorrectness, you know no one’s safe. So what can you say? Here’s an A-to-Z guide to the new PC.

A is for America. One-time land of the free, founded by un-PC white dudes partial to a drink and sex with slaves, but more recently the birthplace of identity politics (see under I) and 21st-century taboos (see everything below).

B is for bitch. Perfect example of a word some can say but others can’t. For a sassy chick to refer to herself and her girl pals as ‘bitches’ is cool; for a rapper with metal teeth it is rampant misogyny. To find out if you’re allowed to utter this word, put your hand in your underpants. Is there a penis? You can’t say it. If you do you’re the other B: bigot.

C is for cultural appropriation. When people from one culture adopt the styles or habits of people from another culture. Like middle-class white kids making rap music or donning Native American head-dresses at a rock festival. This is really bad. Thankfully Glastonbury is now restricting the sale of Native American dress and some British unis have banned sombreros. C is also for check your privilege. You must do this all the time. If you’re white, male and middle class, you’re super-privileged and must never speak about women’s issues or black people’s problems. White women are more privileged than black women, and straight black women are more privileged than queer black women (don’t worry — queer is OK here: see under Q). ‘What about solidarity and cross-class, cross-race empathy?’ I hear you cry. Please. Solidarity has been replaced by intersectionality (see below). Stop being a dinosaur.

D is for dinosaur. I shouldn’t have said the D-word, sorry. Alongside geezer, codger and blue-haired, it’s what the New York Times calls an ‘age-disparaging word’. Never say it, even to refer to actual dinosaurs: in 2012 some New York schools banned the lessons on dinosaurs for fear of offending creationist kids, and offending people is the worst thing you can ever do (see under O).

E is for ethically challenged. You, if you don’t adhere to these rules.

F is for faggot. Fine if you’re a gay man referring to himself, but it’ll earn you a knock on the door from the boys in blue if you’re a straight man referring to someone else. Never write it on a missile. American Navymen were instructed to ‘more closely edit their spontaneous acts of penmanship’ after one of them wrote ‘Hijack this, you faggots’ on a bomb for the Taleban. Members of the Taleban do not accept homosexuality as a valid way of life and thus should not be reminded of its existence as they have their heads blown off.

G is for gender. Never assume to know gender. Someone might look and sound like a man, and even wear a beard and possess a penis, but ‘he’ might identify as a woman, which is his/her/their right. Who are you, or nature, to say whether someone is male or female or something else entirely? Facebook now has 71 gender choices. The City University of New York recently banned the words ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ from ‘all types of correspondence’ with students in order to prevent the faux pas of wrongly guessing a student’s gender ID. Ask everyone you meet: ‘What gender pronouns should I use when referring to you?’

H is for hir and hirs: gender-neutral terms for him and her. Safest bet when you’re at a dinner party surrounded by people whose preferred gender you don’t yet know.

I is for identity politics. Always define yourself by your natural characteristics rather than your character, achievements or beliefs. You are first and foremost male, female, other, straight, gay, black or white and should refer to yourself as such. Martin Luther King should have checked his privilege when he had that nonsense dream of a world where people ‘will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. That’s easy for a middle-class straight man to say, Marty. I is also for intersectionality, the tearaway offspring of identity politics, where you must constantly wonder how your various personal identities intersect with each other (or something).

J is for jokes. Don’t tell them. It’s too risky. Rape jokes, Holocaust jokes, sexist jokes, banter-based jokes — you might find them funny but others will experience them as a threat to their mental safety. Learn from the Dapper Laughs debacle: a wicked joke can hurt thousands and end your career.

K is for kiss chase. Never let your kids play this. For boys to chase girls in search of a smacker on the cheek is evidence of a culture of male sexual entitlement, so mercifully this ‘game’ has been banned in schools across the nation.

L is for LGBTQQIAAP. No, not a place in Wales — an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies and pansexual. If you’re the kind of person who says ‘gays’, or even worse, ‘the gays’, stop it at once and learn this by heart.

M is for microaggressions. A microaggression is an unwitting act of discrimination by people who think they’re super right-on, such as asking a black woman how she keeps her hair so funky or inquiring if a lesbian has ever had ‘real sex’. On some American campuses, professors have been accused of racial microaggression for correcting spelling mistakes in black students’ essays.

N is for nigger. Massive no-no (unless you’re a rapper, and even then tread carefully). New editions of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn come with the N-word expunged. Just as cigarettes are being cut out of old cartoons and Ghostbusters is being remade with the main roles now played by womyn (see under W). The past must be corrected.

O is for offence. The original sin. Offending people is worse than punching them. And offence is in the eye of the outraged — it’s they who decide if your words are hurtful. One man’s joke might be another’s mortal blow to his self-esteem. To avoid offence, speak as little as possible.

P is for people of colour. Coloured is bad, but people of colour is fine. Of course, it might one day be added to the list of once-PC but now sinful phrases, so keep an eye out for updates.

Q is for queer. Queers can say this, but non-queers can’t. Unless you’re an ally (see under L), in which case you can.

R is for racist. You’re a racist. I know you think you aren’t, which is sweet, but you are. Everyone is. By this point, we should all know about ‘unwitting racism’ — being racist without realising it. The solution? Racial sensitivity training for all. Stop racism by encouraging nationwide racial consciousness.

S is for safe space. A zone, usually at a university, in which no offensive language, off-colour jokes, banter, lads’ mags, mansplaining (men talking about feminism), manspreading (men spreading their legs), gender-questioning, or any other wicked words or deeds are allowed. A prototype PC society.

T is for tranny. Never say this word. Ever. It’s the Voldemort of PC. Whisper it and you will be accused of transphobia — not a country but a mental malaise that prevents you from accepting that gender is a fluid concept.

U is for uterus. If you have one of these, you may speak about abortion; if you don’t, you may not.

V is for vagina. People with vaginas, check your privilege. You aren’t the only people who get to call yourselves women. Plenty of folk do not have vaginas but are every bit as female as you. The US women’s college Mount Holyoake recently banned The Vagina Monologues because it ‘offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman’.

W is for womyn. An alternative spelling of ‘woman’ for those who reject patriarchal spelling norms.

X is for Generation X, the post-baby-boom generation that is the architect of PC, which having waged a war of words against its hippy-dippy parents and their harebrained belief in a colourblind, gender-ignoring world, is now caught in a desperate rearguard action against younger activists armed with hashtags and intersectionality.

Y is for #YesAllWomen. A social campaign — well, a Twitter hashtag — created in response to the assertion that said #NotAllMen were rapists. Maybe they aren’t, but #YesAllWomen are victims.

Z is for ze. Gender-neutral term for he or she (see Rod Liddle, opposite). Z is also for zero tolerance. Of homophobia, rude old novels, saucy photos, and anything that might offend someone somewhere sometime. From student unions to trendy workplaces, the PC love nothing more than to boast of their lack of tolerance. You thought tolerance was a good thing? Get with the programme. Don’t be a D-word.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432672/an-a-to-z-of-the-new-pc/feed/248political_correctness_cmyk2.SE-old-guyfeaturedJail breakhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431352/in-two-years-ive-seen-the-prison-system-fall-apart/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431352/in-two-years-ive-seen-the-prison-system-fall-apart/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9431352It used to be sewing mail bags, picking oakum and working the treadmill, now the government has come up with a wheeze to get convicts busy with sandbags, fence posts… Read more

]]>It used to be sewing mail bags, picking oakum and working the treadmill, now the government has come up with a wheeze to get convicts busy with sandbags, fence posts and kit for the armed forces. The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, says the ten-year deal will teach convicts ‘the value of a hard day’s work’.

This has been tried for six months with Coldingley prison in Surrey and Grayling reports savings of nearly £500,000. Although that figure must be offset by the £72,000 of taxpayers’ money he has just spent trying to overturn a court ruling against his ban on inmates receiving books from visitors. He is also planning major reforms on rehabilitation of offenders.

‘For too long we have released prisoners back onto the streets with £46 in their pockets and little else other than the hope that they would sort themselves out,’ he says. ‘Now all this will change. For the first time we will be giving all offenders a proper chance at rehabilitation, instead of just leaving them to wander the streets and get on with it.’

Anyone who has watched the destruction of our penal institutions over the past two years may wonder what happened to the idea of prison as a place of rehabilitation. What kind of men are now being released? When I taught in Wormwood Scrubs in 2007, it kept 1,355 men confined in a place built for 860. It was chronically underfunded even then.

But I first realised how good it was when we were visited in the art room by some redoubtable prison reformers from New Jersey. They gazed in wonder at a lot of messy acrylic paint tubes and wizened old brushes. The sinks were filthy and a group of Afro-Caribbean inmates hid behind tents made out of bedsheets and easels, smoking spliffs, listening to rap music and talking patois. To me it looked like a pit, but to the pious American ladies it was a revelation. They had seen nothing like it back home.

Once I’d got used to prison culture, with the constant intrusion of security, I found the Scrubs quite a cosy place. For many inmates it was the nearest thing to home they’d ever had. It was dirty, the food was lousy, the medical facilities were almost nil, but the men made friends and made the best of it. Many came up to education classes; these were full and had a waiting list to get in. Some men took an interest in art for the first time, while radical Muslims who couldn’t look at human images enjoyed the work of flower painters such as Henri Fantin-Latour.

As we enjoyed our coffee and biscuits together, smuggled in by me, I used to fantasise about taking a party to the National Gallery or the National Theatre. I felt I could reach them through cultural experiences they hadn’t had before. My other classes in English and history were great fun, although the foreign men, particularly the Africans, always outshone the British lads, who had had the worst education.

Britons often have a false picture of prison life from watching American films, which dwell on the terrible cult of prisoner rape, but there was none of that in the Scrubs and I didn’t hear of it in other UK prisons. Perhaps that was because 32 per cent of inmates in the Scrubs were Caribbean and tended to be homophobic. When I made a request for Peter Tatchell to give a talk, the governor refused, saying it would ‘cause a riot’.

I didn’t hear about much bullying, though men got beaten for stealing from each other. The people I met in my classes were happy enough and some thrived. Boys who’d grown up in care appreciated the order and routine. Jokes were currency and I hadn’t laughed so much since I was in school.

My prison experience reminded me of Porridge, the old TV sitcom, and films such as Two-Way Stretch. But the peaceful, rather indolent prison I knew has gone. Over the past two years the Scrubs, always a well of need, has changed into a pit of despair, from an establishment described by inspectors as getting the basics right to a hole where five men died last year. As many as six people a month are now killing themselves in our prisons.

The place where I worked was doing well on tight rations, but now it has been left to starve. Prison governors have been ordered by Grayling’s department to make savings of £150 million a year. A recent spending review saw a further 10 per cent reduction in the Ministry of Justice’s budget. The most damaging effect of this has been to drastically cut the number of prison officers.

In the Scrubs, there are wings containing 300 men controlled by nine junior officers. Many senior staff have been made redundant or have left due to stress. There is increasing violence between staff and prisoners, as well as between prisoners, who now spend all day banged up in their badly ventilated cells. Attendance at classes has dropped and many workshops, the key places for rehabilitation, have closed.

‘I’m absolutely clear, there is not a crisis in our prisons,’ Grayling declared last year, at the same time as the Isis Young Offenders Institution in London was criticised in an official report for the high levels of violence there, often involving weapons. Official figures from the Ministry of Justice showed that the number of assaults by prisoners in England and Wales rose to more than 15,000 in 2013–14, from around 14,000 the year before. The latest statistics also reveal a record number of serious assaults, including attacks by prisoners on staff.

Danny Kruger, who runs the crime-prevention charity ‘Only Connect’, says his work has become almost impossible since government cuts. ‘We deliver some education services in London prisons,’ he says. ‘To do our work we need prison officers to unlock and escort the inmates to the classroom. If we’re lucky we get half a class, maybe six prisoners; if we’re not, we get none. This is what budget cuts and poor morale does to a system that never worked well in the first place.’

Prisons inspector Nick Hardwick, who published a report on the Scrubs last November, said: ‘Major structural changes in late 2013 had led to a significant reduction of resources. We were told that one consequence of this was that a large tranche of experienced staff had left very quickly and that this had been destabilising, not least because the prison had found it difficult to recruit replacements. This inspection found that the prison had declined significantly in almost every aspect.’

‘Wormwood Scrubs has been through a difficult change process,’ says Michael Spurr, chief executive of the National Offender Management Service. ‘It has had to adapt to hold young offenders alongside its adult population while implementing new structures and routines to provide a decent regime for prisoners at a lower cost. This has not been an easy transition.’

It’s been impossible. Our prisons are going the American way, without the hygiene. Nelson Mandela once said, ‘No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.’ Grayling’s empty pronouncements suggest that all this nation really cares about now is getting hold of ready cash.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431352/in-two-years-ive-seen-the-prison-system-fall-apart/feed/28200294161-001featuredThe Tooting poisonerhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431552/the-tooting-poisoner-and-the-relentless-rise-of-the-urban-fox/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431552/the-tooting-poisoner-and-the-relentless-rise-of-the-urban-fox/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9431552Cowering in the corner of a pet shop, I edged towards the door to try to escape as a stranger yelled at me. The man’s face was so puckered up… Read more

]]>Cowering in the corner of a pet shop, I edged towards the door to try to escape as a stranger yelled at me. The man’s face was so puckered up and puce with anger that I feared I was moments away from being beaten to death with a ball-thrower or ham bone.

I had only popped in to buy some dog food for the spaniel and now the spaniel was hiding behind me as a fellow customer shouted abuse. The lady who owned the pet shop was trying to appease the shouting man, who had his own dog with him, a scrappy little terrier who looked as terrified as the rest of us as his owner went tonto.

And what, I hear you ask, was the issue that had set the man off on his barking mad rant? Well, it was all to do with the strange case of the Tooting fox poisoner.

I say fox poisoner. It would be more accurate to say fox and dog poisoner. Because some idiot has gone rogue in the south London neighbourhood where I live and taken it upon themselves to put poison down on Tooting Common at night to kill foxes. Sadly, a much loved dog has been killed after eating the poison, believed to be hidden in lumps of cheese.

The Labrador who died was a great mate of Cydney, my cocker spaniel, and his owner was a friend of mine. We regularly enjoyed carefree walks together. I have not taken Cydney off the lead on the Common since I found out about the sad death of her friend. I daren’t let her go near the bushes bordering people’s back gardens, where it is thought the poison is being left. We are desperately upset about this, and worried sick.

But here’s the thing: regardless of whether this poisoner is dealt with, there is an underlying problem. Foxes are becoming so rampant in some areas of London, and the authorities are doing so little about them. It is inevitable that people are taking the law into their own hands.

The foxes here run wild, they ransack bins, they eat small pets, they spread mange to dogs. They foul public areas so extensively that it begins to make no difference whether dog owners pick up their poo. They are bold and fearless, sauntering about the streets in broad daylight quite casually. Sometimes, there are easily more foxes than people walking the pavements by my house. That cannot be right, and it is certainly not natural.

They are not meant to be in our habitat. But they have been encouraged by people feeding them. A few years ago, I was taking a black cab home when the driver wound his window down, reached into the passenger footwell, and started throwing Wall’s sausages on to the Common. I urged him to desist, but he said foxes were wonderful creatures. And that is what we are up against.

Every day, I sit in my study at home with foxes screaming outside my window. They come up the path to my front door and screech for food. They no longer run away when you approach them. In summer, they come through open back doors. And you cannot do anything, because attacking them is forbidden. They have more rights than us.

And the authorities seem happy with this. I once rang Lambeth council to ask for advice on the issue and they sent me an RSPCA leaflet explaining what to feed foxes — they particularly like chicken pieces, apparently. Although they’re also partial to a pet rabbit or two, in my experience.

The mayor, Boris Johnson, makes noises whenever babies are attacked about doing some kind of cull. But no action has been forthcoming.

And so there I was, standing in my local pet shop chatting with the owner about how terrible it was that our friend’s labrador had been poisoned by someone sent half mad by the fox problem, and how this showed that the council should do something, when a man entered with his dog and began to shout: ‘You can’t kill foxes! You’re not allowed to kill foxes! No one has the right to kill foxes! No one!’ And he went on screaming about the rights of foxes until I edged backwards out of the shop, sensing that the animal rights nerve had been activated.

Later that day, as news spread like wildfire about the Tooting poisoner, a friend who also walks her dog on the Common rang me in a panic. She lives in the street where it is thought the poisoner resides, and there were very dark murmurings there. ‘I’m really scared,’ she said. ‘People are talking about finding the poisoner and making him eat poison.’ Everyone in her street was under suspicion as the net closed in. The reality was probably that more than one resident was putting poison down in their back gardens where they joined the Common, she said. But the Tooting Poisoner had gained almost mythical status and people were hysterical.

She suggested we stop discussing the fox problem with anyone, for fear of reprisals. Anyone who so much as suggested that the poisoner might have been acting out of an urge to defend his property might be subject to abuse, or actual physical attack.

This was ridiculous. I decided to contact the local authorities. But a Wandsworth council press officer emailed me a response which was almost as hysterical as the man in the pet shop: ‘As a dog owner myself I certainly hope its (sic) not true — and if we receive any evidence whatsoever that it is happening we will do everything we can to catch those responsible and prosecute them — and urge the courts to impose the toughest possible sentence.’ Life imprisonment, perhaps?

I asked him what residents ought to do about the fox problem. He sent me the council’s official guidance, which was for householders to secure their bins. That was all.

I contacted Lambeth council, but they didn’t get back to me. They’re probably too busy producing more leaflets with yummy chicken recipes for Charlie.

I rang the Metropolitan police and their reaction was even scarier: ‘You need to call the RSPCA,’ said the lady there. ‘Oh god no,’ I said, and I tried to explain that I wanted help from the proper authorities to advise residents on the apparent death threats being made. I did not want a million pounds of little old ladies’ money spent pursuing one bloke who had put down a piece of poison-laced cheddar. Because then what? The problem would not go away. I tried to explain that it was a triple whammy. Whereas we used to live in fear of foxes, we now live in fear of foxes, fox poisoners and fox poisoner prevention vigilante squads.

But the lady at the Met was unimpressed. ‘Well,’ she said, philosophically. ‘This sort of thing happens from time to time.’

]]>It’s been said for years now: Islam needs its reformation. Some centuries ago, Christianity ditched its theocratic impulse and affirmed modern political values — let Islam do likewise! Let its Luther, who is presumably sulking in the corner of some madrassa, come forward! Islam hath need of him!

This sounds briskly no-nonsense, in its willingness to say that Islam has a problem that needs fixing, and open-minded about religion, in its assumption that religions can change and be compatible with secularism. But it’s actually lazy and historically illiterate. It involves a misreading of how Christianity relates to modernity.

It implies that, once upon a time, Christianity was in conflict with healthy political values, but it learned to change its ways. Maybe it is supposed that Martin Luther was the pioneer of this, that he said something along the lines of: ‘Let’s question what the Pope tells us and adapt our faith so that it accords with humanist morality, equal rights, and the separation of church and state.’

Instead, Luther said something along the lines of: ‘Let’s purify our religion, be more faithful to its essential logic, contained in its founding documents.’ And this reforming movement gradually produced new political realities and ideas. Creating a more liberal political order was not on Luther’s agenda, nor on anyone’s at that time, but it did become a central concern of some Protestants in the next century. The Protestant Reformation was not a matter of Christianity accepting the truth of something else, something beyond itself. And that is what people really want when they say that Islam needs a reformation: they want it to accept the truth of western values, adapt to them.

So the ‘Islam needs its reformation’ line makes this mistake. It supposes that Christianity and Islam are two comparable forms of religion: if Religion A adapted to modernity, Religion B can too. But Religion A didn’t adapt to modernity: it inadvertently made modernity, by trying to be more purely itself.

The game-changing idea that emerged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation can be summed up thus: down with theo-cracy! (Maybe I’m a soppy liberal patriot, but it seems to me that this breakthrough was 90 per cent English.) Let the state no longer enforce religious uniformity, but rather protect people’s freedom to choose how to worship. This revolution in theo-politics was proposed not by atheists but by idealistic Protestants. God wills this new sort of liberty-protecting state, said people like John Milton and John Locke. (Nonbelievers like Spinoza and Voltaire followed in their wake and have received undue credit.)

Why did they think that political liberty was God’s will? They had learned from earlier Protestants like Luther to distrust bossy institutions and religious rules; they now applied this to politics as well as religion. And they pointed to the New Testament, which affirms no theocratic model of politics (unlike the Old Testament, with its holy kings). The whole tradition of coercion in religion is wrong, is at odds with scripture, they said. For example, John Locke, in his ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’, claimed that toleration is ‘the principal mark of the true church’.

Christianity was not suddenly converted to liberty from then on. The big guns, Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, preferred the old theocratic idea, and have taken three centuries to rethink. Though the issue has not been neatly resolved (Christianity inevitably reacts against secular liberal values in certain ways), nor is it dangerously unresolved: almost no Christians want to create some alternative theocratic order, by any means necessary.

Are there are any grounds for thinking that Islam can echo this story? That it can move to seeing its theocratic tendency as erroneous, to seeing coercion in religion as a hideous heresy? I’m sorry to sound gloomy but I’m not sure there are.

The problem is twofold. First, liberal values already exist, and are firmly seen as external, or alien, to Islam. To say that freedom of religion and freedom of speech are central principles of Islam just doesn’t ring true: we all know that they have been most fully formulated and institutionalised, over centuries, in the West.

Second, as Douglas Murray recently outlined in these pages, the founding texts of Islam are ambiguous about violence: the Prophet’s calls to compassion and mercy coexist with his affirmation of the use of force in the name of God. A liberal Muslim can argue, with some reason, that Mohammed put more emphasis on compassion than his contemporaries did, but cannot deny that he affirmed a basically theocratic ideal. By contrast, Christianity’s founding texts do authorise a radical break with theocratic violence. To say that Jesus advocated nonviolence rather than holy war is not just one interpretation. Christianity therefore has an anti-theocratic logic that Islam (and in fact Judaism) lacks.

So what should we do? Regretfully conclude that Islam is unreformable, and treat it as a stubbornly medieval ‘other’? That doesn’t feel like a healthy attitude; it might justify persecution, or at least marginalisation. Instead we should reserve judgment on the ultimate fate of Islam and trust that toleration — confident, hard-headed toleration — is the best medicine for reactionary ideologies. In the past, the British press was full of anguished debates about whether Roman Catholicism should be tolerated. It seemed unreformable in its belief that the Pope’s authority trumped that of the liberal state. Surely these fifth columnists should not be allowed to disseminate their creed, or to start their own schools, said many. But Catholicism was tolerated, and as a result of living under liberalism it gradually liberalised. In the case of Islam, the same thing must be hoped for.

I said that toleration should be confident and hard-headed. Also, odd though it may sound, it should be unashamedly inconsistent. Most of the punditry since the Paris attacks has been too black-and-white. It assumes that we must choose between fully tolerating Islam, meaning never offending Muslims, making them feel entirely comfortable here; and fully affirming secular liberal values, however much it offends them. Of course we must not make such a choice, not ever.

We should not be so tolerant of Muslims that we agree never to mock their religion — but generally we should avoid such offence. Nor should we necessarily tolerate the anti-western venom of many of their preachers — but generally we should, as much as we can bear to. True toleration is necessarily inconsistent. We can only hope that such toleration encourages liberal interpretations of Islam to flourish, but whether these can contribute to a decisive change within Islam, God knows.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431742/why-calling-for-an-islamic-reformation-is-lazy-and-historically-illiterate/feed/243TheofeaturedDangerous charactershttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431152/the-most-expensive-typing-error-ever/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431152/the-most-expensive-typing-error-ever/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9431152In Paul Gallico’s 1939 novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, the hero’s journey is set in motion by a comma. Hiram is a copy-reader on a New York morning paper,… Read more

]]>In Paul Gallico’s 1939 novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, the hero’s journey is set in motion by a comma. Hiram is a copy-reader on a New York morning paper, and the comma — ‘eventually known as the $500,000 comma’ — is one he inserts into a contentious article that saves his employer in a libel case. The publisher rewards him with a $1,000 bonus and a month’s paid vacation, and he sails for Europe, where he fights Nazis and rescues a princess.

In real life, sadly, publicity comes not to the Hirams of the world but to the anti-Hirams. Another one had his day in the stocks last week, when the High Court gave its judgment on what may eventually be known as the £8.8 million ‘s’.

This ‘s’ cropped up in a database search made at Companies House six years ago by a clerk who was meant to register the liquidation of a firm called Taylor & Son. Instead he applied a digital death notice to Taylor & Sons, a Welsh engineering company that had survived two world wars and was just then reorganising to deal with the aftermath of the financial crisis. Though the information at Companies House was corrected three days later, the mistake had already spread into other people’s records: Taylor & Sons’ suppliers stopped its credit, and the business went into administration.

That £8.8 million figure is the price that lawyers for the company’s former managing director put on the error. Even if it’s accepted in full, however, the ‘s’ will not be the most expensive typo in history. For starters, there is the single missing character blamed for the failure of Mariner 1, an unmanned Nasa mission bound for Venus that fizzled shortly after its launch in 1962. (Contemporary reports spoke of a hyphen left out somewhere in the guidance code, but excited pedants have since advanced several competing theories: Mariner 1 is probably the only space probe to have a section in its Wikipedia entry headed ‘Other punctuation’.)

Nor yet, though Taylor & Sons had 250 employees, is it the most tragic. In New South Wales two years ago, a boy of 18 months went into cardiac arrest while his parents awaited an ambulance that had apparently been booked on to the dispatch system for 19.14 instead of 9.14. He later died in hospital.

It does, however, have all the characteristics of a classic catastrophic typo: a single tiny change inserted, like Hiram’s $500,000 comma, at a point where it turns out to make an explosive difference. The perfect typo is small enough that writers and editors read over it, subconsciously substituting what should be there, and yet consequential enough that every innocent reader will notice it.

For maximum horror, the typo should give rise not to an absurdity, but to something plausible yet wrong. The notorious Penguin Pasta Bible of 2010, in which the tagliatelle with prosciutto called for ‘freshly ground black people’, caused much sniggering, a great deal of justified embarrassment, and a reprint; but it won’t have ruined anyone’s dinner. I’m not sure as much is true of the spicy tomato soup recipe that appeared in the Guardian last October, specifying half a tablespoon of cayenne pepper instead of half a teaspoon.

Semi-automated systems, like the Companies House database or the New South Wales ambulance dispatch computer, can turn clumsiness into destruction more efficiently than human ones, but their limited inputs also make them easier to secure against typogeddon. (Companies House, for instance, already had a policy of rejecting any winding up order that didn’t come with the company’s unique identifying number —but it had apparently failed to explain this properly to the people meant to do the rejection. They almost certainly know now.)

With continuous prose, here at The Spectator, for instance, there is still no substitute for a skilled proofreader — preferably one coming to the material fresh, so that there are no previous drafts or expectations to get between them and the text. The kind of focus required is peculiar: you have to see exactly what’s in front of you while simultaneously forming pictures of what might be meant to be there, and spotting the difference.

Very few people can keep that double focus up all the time — as readers of this magazine, for which I am chief sub, may have noticed. That’s why my heart goes out to the anti-Hirams. In time, the spellcheck tolls for us all.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9431152/the-most-expensive-typing-error-ever/feed/14compfeaturedVenicehttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9432592/how-to-walk-along-canals-in-venice-without-feeling-like-a-tourist/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9432592/how-to-walk-along-canals-in-venice-without-feeling-like-a-tourist/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9432592I arrived in Venice believing it would reek of sewage. It didn’t. The walk into the centre went through cobbled alleys packed with loud Americans in sandals and Italian ladies… Read more

]]>I arrived in Venice believing it would reek of sewage. It didn’t. The walk into the centre went through cobbled alleys packed with loud Americans in sandals and Italian ladies tottering in kitten heels. But it was when crossing the Rialto bridge that I first felt as though I was truly in Venice, with tacky gold gondola models for sale at extortionate prices, and tourists jostling for prime photo spots. How else are you supposed to know you’re on holiday?

The canals are wonderfully chaotic; smaller boats have to dart out of the way of the Vaporettos as perilously overcrowded gondolas bob in their wakes. Gondoliers nap in the afternoon shade, pretending not to see the half a dozen tourists who turn up hoping to squeeze in to one boat and make their guide earn his money.

The waterbus service is far more glamorous than a 257 from Walthamstow Central but is just as crowded and sweaty, especially in the summer sun. It’s easy to let the fight for a seat distract you from the turquoise water just outside the window. As one historical monument drifts out of view another quickly takes its place: it seems as if every stretch of land is home to a crumbling cathedral.

I couldn’t help but ponder the impracticality of Venice. Nipping to the shops involves clambering into a wooden boat and the buildings look tired and worn from the water constantly lapping against them. Our gondolier sweetly told us in his thick Italian accent that the damage was caused by ‘salt-water corruption’.

The outer islands of Venice have a much calmer feel. Yes, Saint Mark’s Square is impressive but the tour groups are difficult to dodge while holding a rapidly melting gelato. The islands of Burano and Murano, famous for lace and glass respectively, are the better bet for a quiet lunch and cappuccino. Family-run shops, often with dogs dozing in the doorway, sell locally made wares far superior to the usual tourist tat. The brightly coloured houses of Burano have a cartoony feel, in stark contrast to the terracotta shades found on the main island. On Murano, men slog away in the glassworks, their faces red with heat. It is fascinating to see a delicate glass horse born from a molten lump on the end of a stick.

Even after a few days — without so much as a visit to an art gallery — it wasn’t difficult to understand why so many young couples still choose to marry in Venice. The Floating City becomes even more romantic, almost magical, once the sun sets and the canals turn into black ribbons. Given the choice between shiny skyscrapers and the rustic charm of Venice, I know which I’d pick every time.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9432592/how-to-walk-along-canals-in-venice-without-feeling-like-a-tourist/feed/6calm-and-colourful-buranofeaturedThe great European revolthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9427141/europes-crisis-is-camerons-opportunity/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9427141/europes-crisis-is-camerons-opportunity/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9427141Napoleon notoriously preferred his generals to be lucky — and on that score at least, he would have approved of David Cameron. The triumph of the Syriza party in Greece… Read more

]]>Napoleon notoriously preferred his generals to be lucky — and on that score at least, he would have approved of David Cameron. The triumph of the Syriza party in Greece presents him with a glorious opportunity to solve the European question that has bedevilled the Tories for so long. Europe’s difficulty is Cameron’s opportunity.

The European elite has been shaken by the scale of Syriza’s victory. Just a few weeks ago, Cameron was arguing in private that Greek voters, who remain overwhelmingly pro-EU, would ultimately not back a party that was intent on a confrontation with the eurozone authorities. European diplomats stressed that even if Syriza won it wouldn’t get close to a majority and would end up having to form a coalition with To Potami, which would moderate its demands, so no need to panic. But Europe now finds itself confronted with a hard-line coalition of Syriza and the Independent Greeks, a three-year-old party of right-wing populists every bit as determined as Syriza to renegotiate the terms of the bailout. Syriza, a party of the radical left, and the Independent Greeks agree on little more than the imperative of securing relief of Greece’s debts.

The decision of Alexis Tsipras, the new Prime Minister of Greece, to go with a party of the nationalist right is a signal to Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt that he is quite serious about what he said on the campaign trail. He is not going to back down. On his first day in office, he held talks with Russia’s ambassador and has appointed a Marxist academic as his finance minister. The scene is now set for a reckoning in the eurozone: the fundamental contradictions between its economics and its politics are going to have to be confronted.

Politically, it is unclear what answer there can be to the Greek question. Syriza’s whole purpose is to end EU-imposed austerity in Greece. Tsipras has to be able to say that he has stopped what he has called the ‘fiscal waterboarding’. But northern European leaders, led by Angela Merkel, are bitterly opposed to any concessions to Athens. They fear that if Syriza succeeds, voters across the eurozone periphery will turn to anti–austerity parties in the hope of securing better bailout terms.

In Spain, that would mean Podemos — a party formed a year ago, but which now regularly tops the polls — winning the elections there this year. Europe’s leaders also worry that going easy on Greece will boost parties of the radical right in their own backyard. Leaders are acutely aware of how quickly new threats to their position can emerge in Europe’s volatile political scene. Parties can be formed and lead the polls within months.

One argument being advanced for why there can be no immediate concessions to Athens is Finland’s election on 19 April. Its prime minister, Alexander Stubb, is trailing in the polls — an obvious concern to his ally Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor and the unofficial keeper of the European order. If she cuts Greece any slack that would risk angering Finnish voters and making matters even worse for Stubb — who is facing a threat from the nationalist Finns Party — so that it might be impossible for him to recover. There are no votes in Finland (or anywhere in triple A-rated Europe) in letting Greece off the hook.

Diplomatic sources report that Merkel is in no mood to compromise. She is deeply unhappy about the scale of the money-printing programme launched by the European Central Bank. She fears that this will make it easier for recalcitrant southern Europeans to avoid making the structural reforms she believes are vital for the survival of the single currency. She also has a very German worry about the damaging effects of quantitative easing and knows that her electorate share that concern. The anti-euro Alternative for Deutschland party is aiming to capitalise on unease about Europe’s monetary policy in the state elections in Hamburg next month and in Bremen in May.

The more anxious Merkel feels about the direction of the EU, the more reluctant she is to lose Britain as a member. The UK has been one of the most vocal supporters of deficit reduction and market liberalisation and without us the EU’s centre of gravity would shift even further towards the dirigiste south. Merkel needs Britain more than she did last Christmas, so the price that she is prepared to pay to keep us in the EU is now higher.

In contrast, she is less concerned about the EU hanging on to Greece. In conversations with other EU states, the Germans express an almost reckless confidence that — unlike in 2011 or 2012 — the eurozone could survive Greece being forced out of the currency union. The consensus in Brussels is that this is not a risk, since Syriza will eventually have to accept that its hand is not as strong as it thinks. But there is a serious danger of an accidental ‘Grexit’. Syriza has no experience of government or international negotiations. Its members include Maoists and communists who regard the Greek Communist party as too moderate. There is, therefore, as one senior British figure warns, ‘the capacity for misjudgments’ in this game of chicken with Brussels.

The country that really keeps European policy makers up at night isn’t Greece or Spain, but France. Its economy is sinking, with no signs of a sustained or sustainable recovery. Its unemployment stands at a record high of 3.5 million, it has had to abolish the much-hyped 75 per cent tax rate on the rich after it turned out to be an abysmal failure, and its tax revenues are so weak that it’s now looking at a deficit of 4.1 per cent of GDP — far outside the 3 per cent limit supposedly demanded of EU member states. If the European Commission applied its own rules properly, France would be fined for this continuing inability to get its books in order.

The great debate is whether France is, in economic terms, part of northern Europe or stagnating southern Europe. Tellingly, the day after the Greek result, François Hollande invited Tsipras to the Elysée while Nicolas Sarkozy went to Berlin to see his old ally Angela Merkel, reflecting the division between the current president and the past president over what role France should try to play in Europe.

But while both men will probably be their parties’ candidates in the presidential election in 2017, it is the prospect of someone else winning that spooks Europe. Until now, even if the Front National made the final round of the French presidential election, you could be sure that it wouldn’t take the Elysée. But that is not so certain anymore. There was even a recent poll which had Marine Le Pen, who has moved her party away from the explicit racism of its past, winning the run-off this time around.

Fear of Front National largely explains Sarkozy’s shift on Europe. In an essay published last year, he argued that the EU should hand back half its powers to member states. Over the past few months, he has hardened his rhetoric on this point, warning that Europe will ‘explode’ without reform and threatening to end French co-operation with Brussels unless he gets his way on border controls.

Now, given that the final round of the French presidential election is not until May 2017 and Cameron is committed to holding his referendum on EU membership before the end of that year, it is not clear how much the Sarkozy agenda could help him. British government figures also caution that Sarkozy might want the ‘wrong powers’ back; he might want to weaken the ability of the Commission to prevent governments from blocking foreign takeovers.

But Sarkozy’s bold talk is an illustration of how France — and the fear of a Le Pen victory — could end up changing the whole EU debate. Cameron could suddenly find that there is far more on offer at the negotiating table than he currently expects. This would give him an opportunity to craft a deal that would go far enough to satisfy the eurosceptic instincts of his party. At the moment, his plans for the renegotiation, as far as they exist, look like they will fall short of what several of his cabinet ministers and many of his MPs want.

The British renegotiation could turn into a moment for a wider rebalancing of the relationship between the EU and its member states. Sarkozy’s visit to Berlin on Monday showed that the German Chancellor is still close to the former French president. Given that she broke diplomatic protocol to offer him her support ahead of the last French presidential election, it seems fair to assume that she will be guided by him on what is needed to prevent the catastrophe of a Front National presidency befalling Europe.

Cameron, though, has to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity to press for radical reform, if it presents itself. During a previous acute phase of the eurozone crisis in 2011–12, Cameron and Osborne refused to try to use it to renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership. In private, their aides argued that if your neighbour’s house is on fire, you don’t start trying to negotiate a reduction on your water rates. But the more Europe is in crisis, the more important it becomes for the EU to keep this country in it. George Osborne has long argued that Britain would eventually be able to get an acceptable deal from the rest of the EU because it is, ultimately, in everyone’s interests. He likes to say that northern Europe wants Britain in as a liberal and free trading influence, that the Baltics and the East European states value our hawkish stance on Russia and that the rest of the EU understands the awful message that would be sent to investors around the world if Britain decided that it couldn’t stay in the EU.

Some in the government caution that if the eurozone’s problems worsen, there’ll be less ‘bandwidth’ available for dealing with the British renegotiation. They fret that in these circumstances few people will want to pay attention to the details of London’s demands. But, I suspect, this will be trumped by the fear of losing this country at a time when the whole European project is in danger of failing.

All this would be irrelevant unless Cameron wins the general election. But the situation in Greece might help him here, too. A return of the eurozone crisis would make the perfect backdrop for the Tory message: that the choice on 7 May is between stability or economic chaos. Cameron has already started referencing events in Athens whenever he can. The stormy winds from the Continent may yet return him to power — and to a successful renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s EU membership.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9427141/europes-crisis-is-camerons-opportunity/feed/78The-great-European-revoltfeaturedDresden notebookhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/notebook/9426691/confusion-snobbery-and-pegida-a-letter-from-dresden/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/notebook/9426691/confusion-snobbery-and-pegida-a-letter-from-dresden/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9426691Sachsenschweine — Saxon pigs — said the graffiti as my train moved out of Berlin on its way to Dresden. Germany is not as monolithic as it can seem: not… Read more

]]>Sachsenschweine — Saxon pigs — said the graffiti as my train moved out of Berlin on its way to Dresden. Germany is not as monolithic as it can seem: not only do some of its ancient kingdoms continue a ghostly existence as states of the Federal Republic, but also their populations nurture historic rivalries, at least on the football pitches. But the new popular movement in Dresden — Pegida, or ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’, no less — has thrown into relief keener intra-German divisions: not only those between immigrants and ethnic Germans but also those between many German voters and the country’s mortally politically correct establishment.

The French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève was right to predict that, in a post-modern globalised world devoid of traditional values, the only remaining factor structuring society would be snobbery. When Kathrin Oertel, the de facto leader of Pegida, appeared on a chat show on 18 January, she was asked by the anchorman, ‘Who are Pegida’s supporters?’ ‘Ordinary people like you and me,’ she replied. Quick as a flash, the presenter retorted, ‘Like you, maybe. Like me, maybe not.’ Seldom has a member of the media super-class spoken so lucidly.

It is not difficult to mock her thus. Frau Oertel is Essex woman. Although she and her colleagues can mobilise 15,000 to 20,000 people in a wintry square every week, she is tongue-tied and gauche when dropped into national TV. Some of what she says makes sense but, for a protest movement, it has a bizarre lack of focus: the gripes range from immigration to the ‘media of lies’ and the need for more referendums. The language and views of the Stammtisch (the pub regulars) may be a growing political force in Germany, but they have yet to find someone to articulate them in the public sphere: in Britain, Nigel Farage’s smiling combination of dapper suits with a pint and a fag does the trick perfectly.

Worse, Pegida’s 19-point programme does not even contain any reference to Islamisation or Islamism. It talks instead about ‘radicalism, whether political or religious’ and about how parallel societies governed by sharia are undesirable. Faced with the biggest existential issue for the West today, the reaction of Germany’s biggest so-called anti-Islamist movement is silence. Pegida has dropped the ball, if it ever held it in the first place. It is not even clear how the protests will continue — the movement’s momentum in the last few months has been so meteoric (from 300 protesters at the first march to 25,000 two weeks ago) that it can only fizzle out as it comes down to earth.

Snobbery was also the prime mover behind the great anti-Pegida concert organised by the Dresden city authorities on Monday night. One after another, ageing luvvies came on stage to express their contempt for the movement. ‘Pegida is an uprising of stupid ignoramuses,’ a 60-year-old rocker told the crowd to applause. The propaganda was grotesque: one Muslim woman claimed that immigrants now do not feel safe on the streets of the city — what tosh! — while a Spanish student at the university said that Pegida should learn to accept people from different backgrounds. (It is obvious that no one in Pegida has ever even thought of attacking such temporary intra-European movement of people.) The slogans ‘Humanism’, ‘Equality’ and ‘Tolerance’ were shone on to the surrounding buildings, just as 25 years ago the Communist authorities would have proclaimed ‘Unity’, ‘Equality’ or ‘Peace’. Pegida’s organisers themselves took part in the ‘Wir sind das Volk’ marches in 1989; one had the impression on Monday that they had marched in vain.

And, just as at the ‘Je suis Charlie’ march in Paris a fortnight ago, the exalted ‘diversity’ was in fact absent from the attendees of the ‘Wir sind nicht Pegida’ concert. The usual ethnic mix of most German cities vanished as Europeans alone congregated to parade their self-laudatory (and self-destructive?) values of tolerance. Moreover, just as the French marches celebrated the right to free speech at the same time as the police were arresting the anti-Zionist comedian Dieudonné in a dawn raid for another one of his tasteless tweets, so the German political-media-artistic establishment engaged in a truly hallucinatory act of double-think when it continued to denounce Pegida for exaggerating the Islamist danger, while approving the cancellation of the previous week’s march because of a credible threat that the movement’s leader would be assassinated.

But the master — or mistress — of doublethink is Mutti herself: Mummy, as the German Federal Chancellor is sarcastically known. (She has deliberately never had any children.) Angela Merkel put on her glummest rainy-afternoon-in-Chemnitz face to give Pegida supporters a sound telling-off during her New Year’s broadcast to the nation earlier this month. ‘I say to those who go to these marches, don’t follow these people! They have prejudices, coldness, even hatred in their hearts!’ This is the same woman who, in 2010, wowed a room full of CDU young bloods with a full-frontal attack on uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism. When the same person goes from being Norman Tebbit to Shami Chakrabarti in four years, there must be something wrong. No wonder Germans are angry with her.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/notebook/9426691/confusion-snobbery-and-pegida-a-letter-from-dresden/feed/174NotebookfeaturedThe Charles problemhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9426841/as-a-republican-i-used-to-look-forward-to-charles-iii-now-im-scared/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9426841/as-a-republican-i-used-to-look-forward-to-charles-iii-now-im-scared/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9426841When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position… Read more

]]>When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need.

I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy.

If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would be worth reading if the professor had never been the victim of a royal vendetta. Ernst describes growing up in post-war Bavaria, and realising that men who had committed unthinkable crimes were all around him. When his stepfather persisted too long in criticising the laziness of the young generation, Ernst burst out: ‘Isn’t it lucky that we are not as well-organised and efficient as you? We will never manage the logistics of gassing six million Jews.’

He worked in a German homeopathic hospital, and found its directors believed the pseudoscience could accomplish nothing beyond placebo effects. They knew that Samuel Hahnemann’s theory that ‘like cures like’ made no sense. Onions make you cry, but that does not mean onions can cure hay fever just because it also makes you cry, particularly when a homeopath dilutes a trace of onion so thoroughly not one oniony molecule remains in the ‘medicine’.

Ernst came to Britain, fleeing the hierarchical stuffiness of the West German medical system of the 1970s. By then it was already clear that he had no time for quackery in its medical, social and political guises. If they ever met, Prince Charles was bound to hate him.

In 1992, Ernst decided on a career change that mystified his colleagues. He had published more than a thousand papers, and received 14 medical prizes. Instead of taking a prestigious academic post, he applied for an obscure professorship at Exeter University so that he could investigate the safety and effectiveness of alternative medicines.

His decision was not so surprising. Ernst’s specialism was the rehabilitation of patients. He noticed that his colleagues would send their charges off for spinal manipulation, acupuncture and massage therapy when they had no evidence to justify the treatments. You only have to look in a chemist to see why he was interested. Alternative therapy is a huge business, worth $1.6 billion in Britain and $100 billion worldwide. But glance at its products, and you will never see independent assessments of a treatment’s efficacy or dangers.

Ernst and his team of researchers displayed great ingenuity in designing random-ised clinical trials, which were imitated in research centres around the world. They found that chiropractic manipulation of the spine was dangerous in itself — we should ban it. Meanwhile homeopathic remedies, spiritual or distance healing and acupuncture had no medical benefits beyond placebo effects.

From the start, Ernst experienced the hostility of therapists, who responded to criticism with the ferocity of Scientologists. He concluded that they thrived in a wider British culture that ‘was curiously indifferent to the concept of truth’.

Inevitably, Prince Charles raged the loudest. Few supporters of monarchy understand that the Prince’s views are almost medieval in their obscurity. His published writings show that in the dispute between Galileo and the papacy, our future sovereign is on the side of the papacy and against the scientific method, and remains on the papacy’s side four centuries after the event and long after the church has conceded defeat.

After Prince Charles promoted a diet that recommended curing cancer with coffee enemas, Professor Michael Baum told him: ‘The power of my authority comes with a knowledge built on 40 years of study and 25 years of active involvement in cancer. Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life-threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies.’

No chance of that, as Ernst found out. He warned that the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health was promoting treatments without assessing their effectiveness. He told the Prince’s Duchy Originals business that it was passing off bogus herbal remedies as reputable treatments. When the Prince persuaded an economist without medical training to produce a report urging the NHS to save billions by adopting quack remedies, the Times obtained an early draft. Ernst told its reporter that the Prince was peddling misleading information and ‘overstepping his constitutional role’.

The Prince’s private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, disgraced himself and the traditions of free debate in this country by demanding that Exeter University discipline Ernst. After a 13-month investigation, Exeter found no evidence to justify Peat’s charges, but royal displeasure was enough to cow its servile administrators. Ernst had made Exeter an internationally acclaimed centre of medical research. No matter. First they limited his contacts with the press, and then they stopped raising funds for his centre. Ernst left, and without funding his team disbanded. Exeter University returned to the comfort of being a mediocre home for failed Oxbridge candidates, and Britain lost its only centre for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the ‘cures’ that cranks and hucksters push at the public. All because of a prince who lacks a well-rounded adult’s ability to learn his own limitations as well as the limitations of monarchical power.

As the reign of Charles III approaches, it is the duty of monarchists to tackle him. The hereditary principle is their system. Prince Charles is their problem. At the very least, they should insist on Parliament defining where a royal can intervene in politics and public life. If they had any sense — and I doubt that all of them do — they would insist on the crown skipping a generation. They must surely have seen enough by now. They must surely know that a King Charles III will be nothing but trouble.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9426841/as-a-republican-i-used-to-look-forward-to-charles-iii-now-im-scared/feed/286Prince Of Wales And The Duchess Of Cornwall Visit Mexico - Day 3featuredThe silent victoryhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425891/the-tories-have-one-real-success-in-government-and-theyre-scared-to-talk-about-it/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425891/the-tories-have-one-real-success-in-government-and-theyre-scared-to-talk-about-it/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9425891The most significant achievement of this coalition, the only thing they really have any right to crow about, and possibly all that posterity will ever remember them for with anything… Read more

]]>The most significant achievement of this coalition, the only thing they really have any right to crow about, and possibly all that posterity will ever remember them for with anything approaching gratitude, will not be the ‘long-term economic plan’ they never cease to talk up, but the school reforms that the Conservatives seem almost to want to deny as the general election approaches.

This reticence is a mistake. With many voters grown so cynical about mainstream politics that they’re ready to throw in their lot with any passing populist chancer, here is a rare success story that needs shouting from the rooftops. It’s a story about how a cabinet minister took a principled stand against vested interests, delivered in government what he’d promised in opposition, and made a dramatic and sustained difference to a generation of young people, giving them the chance to become the authors of their own life stories.

It is easy to forget how horribly bad so many schools were before Michael Gove became education secretary and it can be surprising — given the relentless badmouthing he had to endure from the teaching profession — how much better those same schools became before Gove was bundled out of his job in last year’s reshuffle.

This week the Commons Education Committee published a report on academies and free schools, two of the government’s flagship policies. The scale and pace of change has been astonishing. Actually it was Labour that invented academies (schools that are independent of local authorities and funded directly by government) back in 2002, and at the initiative of Lord -Adonis just over 200 of them were established in England by the last general election. Now there are 4,344, including around two thirds of all secondary schools. In the same four and a half years, this government has opened 252 free schools. It has a further 111 in the pipeline. These are a special kind of academy opened by groups of parents, by teachers or by charities in response to local demand for a particular kind of school or style of teaching that was not being supplied.

Of course, structures are just structures. You do not change the culture of a school just by adding the word ‘academy’ to its name, nor do you necessarily improve teaching by funding a school from Whitehall and cutting out the local council. But the greater autonomy enjoyed by academies and free schools — being free to innovate, not being bound to follow the national curriculum, being able to hire their own staff directly and negotiate their own terms and conditions — has made a huge difference, allowing head teachers to make swift and radical changes without being constrained by petti-fogging bureaucracy or having to square union representatives before getting anything done. It has allowed new organisations such as Ark and the Harris Federation to create centres of excellence that can leave the fee-charging independent sector open-mouthed in admiration. For many schools all across England, it’s been like moving from the organisational culture of a 1970s-style nationalised industry to that of a 21st–century tech start-up: from nothing is possible to everything is possible.

Although the benefits of autonomy are well attested by organisations such as the OECD, they are hard to quantify. Or, at least, they are hard for the unimaginative types who populate so many of our university education research departments to quantify. Tens of millions of pounds are wasted each year on education research that has little or no value. Much of it is jargon-ridden Marxist drivel, critical of the alleged ‘market-isation’ of education worldwide. Much of the rest of it is just plain junk social science, insufficiently rigorous and with results that are rarely replicated. Charting the impact of academies and free schools hasn’t been a big priority for our academics, thus the Education Committee’s report had to acknowledge that ‘current evidence does not allow us to draw conclusions on whether academies in themselves are a positive force for change’. This allowed the Guardian to spin the report as saying that ‘Policies for improving schools had “no effect”, finds parliamentary enquiry’, the BBC to follow sheep-like down the same path with ‘no proof academies raise standards, say MPs’ and Labour’s Tristram Hunt outrageously to claim that the committee had delivered a ‘damning verdict’ on the government’s school improvement policy.

In fact, what the committee concluded was that while there wasn’t sufficient data on academy performance and it was too soon to draw meaningful conclusions from free schools that have only been open a short time, ‘What can be said is that, however measured, the overall state of schools has improved during the course of the academisation programme.’

And that is the key point. The beneficial effects of the Gove reforms are not confined to the most obvious beneficiaries — the academies and free schools themselves. The rising tide has lifted all boats, including those still under local authority control. ‘The competitive effect upon the maintained sector of the academy model,’ the report ventures, ‘may have incentivised local authorities to develop speedier and more effective intervention in their underperforming schools.’

What’s more, this ‘competitive effect’ may be only half the story. Large numbers of maintained schools (those funded through local councils) have improved phenomenally since 2010, often as a result of learning what is, in fact, possible: how good they can be. For years many of these schools languished in the educational equivalent of total squalor. They were resistant to every top-down initiative and directive that Labour education secretaries from David Blunkett to Ed Balls showered upon them. They could not or would not improve. In many cases this poverty of ambition and aspiration was mirrored in the low expectations staff had of their students. Particularly if those students came from economically deprived backgrounds or ethnic minorities, staff would tend to write them off at an early age. Certainly they wouldn’t imagine that people from challenging backgrounds might have any use for history or modern languages, let alone classics. The idea that any of them would succeed in winning a place at a Russell Group university would have been far-fetched.

What the Gove reforms — not just the structural ones, but changes to curriculum, exams, standards of behaviour, all working together — achieved was a change of collective mindset, a system-wide realisation that a culture of low expectations was self-fulfilling, and that a culture of high expectations could be too. The example of high ambitions, pioneered in the new academies, proved as potent, perhaps more potent than simple ‘competitive’ effects in catalysing change. Academies such as Mossbourne in Hackney, where Ofsted boss Sir Michael Wilshaw used to be headmaster, showed that even schools in the poorest areas, with very high numbers of ethnic minority pupils, many with English as a second language, could nevertheless perform academically at the highest level, obtaining stunning GCSE results and sending significant numbers of students to Cambridge. That was a lesson for everybody, everywhere.

We can be sure that between now and May there will be an endless barrage of lies and disinformation aimed at belittling this government’s achievements in improving schools. The real danger is not that these arguments will be persuasive, but that they will not be rebutted. It sometimes seems as if the government has lost faith in its own successful reforms. Where Tristram Hunt was poised ready to pounce, misrepresenting the committee’s report the moment it was published (in fact, he was at it the day before it was published!), Nicky Morgan has been recorded as absent once again. It may be that the new Education Secretary has orders from No. 10 to do little and say nothing beyond making emollient noises about teacher workload. If so, this is an opportunity missed. No Labour-supporting teacher (or SWP-supporting teacher, for that matter — and there are plenty of those) will be persuaded to vote Conservative by Nicky Morgan avoiding controversy. However, many votes could be lost by the Conservatives if they neglect to accentuate their biggest positive. If Nicky Morgan cannot defend academies and free schools, then let Michael Gove off his leash: we know he can.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425891/the-tories-have-one-real-success-in-government-and-theyre-scared-to-talk-about-it/feed/42Prime Minister Cameron Visits The Harris City Academy In South LondonfeaturedFlowering obsessionhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425641/why-would-someone-pay-hundreds-of-pounds-for-one-snowdrop-bulb-i-think-i-know/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425641/why-would-someone-pay-hundreds-of-pounds-for-one-snowdrop-bulb-i-think-i-know/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9425641I think I’m coming down with galanthomania. It’s a rare affliction, but one that’s hard to shake, and it’s affecting more people every year. Galanthus are snowdrops, and galanthomania is… Read more

]]>I think I’m coming down with galanthomania. It’s a rare affliction, but one that’s hard to shake, and it’s affecting more people every year. Galanthus are snowdrops, and galanthomania is a 21st-century version of that 17th-century craze for tulips which began in the Dutch golden age. At the height of the tulip mania some bulbs were selling at 3,000 or 4,000 florins, almost ten times a craftsman’s annual wage. Snowdrop bulbs aren’t there yet, but collectors spend hundreds of pounds on some rare bulbs, and seed company Thompson and Morgan broke records in 2012 by paying £725 for a single specimen. This rare flower, Galanthus woronowii ‘Elizabeth Harrison’, has yellow ovaries and yellow markings on its white petals, and was a significant increase on the previous record of £360 for a variety called ‘Green Tear’.

This week G. plicatus ‘Bryan Hewitt’, a pure white cup-shaped snowdrop grown in the Netherlands, sold for £133 on eBay and, though I didn’t bid, I felt a pang of envy. The auction site lists dozens of other single bulbs at prices that could buy you a mature tree.

There’s some logic to spending so much. A skilled horticulturalist can take one bulb and turn it into many more plants. Other galanthophiles will pay dearly for rare bulbs, even though these are not the easiest plants to establish, and the demand means constant vigilance. At Sir Harold Hillier Gardens in Hampshire, the plants are locked in alarmed greenhouses when not in flower, and displayed under guard when in bloom.

What makes snowdrop mania particularly strange is that unlike tulips, the variations between snowdrops are tricky for a layman to spot. The only really remarkable mutation is one where the ovaries and small markings on the petals are bright yellow rather than green. Other than that, a rare snowdrop looks like a common one: it has green strap-like leaves and white petals that hang down from an arching stem. Why collect something you need to lie flat on your belly to appreciate, especially when it flowers in winter?

Well, once your eye is tuned to the differences, there are some lovely, distinctive snowdrops that even casual plantsmen can appreciate. I have long loved ‘Lady Elphinstone’, a double variety with lemon-yellow markings on its white petals. Turned upside-down, the centre of the flower is as ornate as a rose. Hanging from its stem, it looks like one of the tutus from Les Sylphides. It costs about £10 for a bulb the size of a 10p piece. Or else there’s ‘Grumpy’, a snowdrop with its own text-messaging emoticon of two little dots above a green U-shaped marking on the lip of the petals. Trudging past a clump on a miserable January morning, a cross commuter might notice that frowny little face, just millimetres high, staring back at them.

Before the acquisitive twitch starts, there’s something that draws a collector towards a certain plant. It’s not a rational calculation, the hope that one little bulb of a mutant yellow-marked flower could turn into a nice little earner, but more an emotional tug. Just as grown men spend thousands of pounds collecting model engines that remind them of being eight, so snowdrops have a nostalgic power. We remember them from our childhoods, when our mothers and grandparents pointed them out in parks.

For me, the snowdrop is the first true flower of the year. The earliest-flowering competitor, the winter aconite, is a pretty thing, a regimental version of a buttercup, but too brash a yellow to play on the heartstrings. Snowdrops give the impression they’d prefer you didn’t pay them too much attention. But in the late winter, those demure little white flowers are alone in a cold, muddy garden. They remind us, during dark days, that brighter things are to come.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425641/why-would-someone-pay-hundreds-of-pounds-for-one-snowdrop-bulb-i-think-i-know/feed/4IsabelHfeaturedThe joy of sixhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425781/the-benefits-of-breeding-like-a-rabbit/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425781/the-benefits-of-breeding-like-a-rabbit/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9425781Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if… Read more

]]>Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth.

I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses to use contraception.

Indeed, I still do fear that I am infertile and that all these conceptions, if not immaculate, are at least miraculous. I am 56, after all. And guess what? Carla is pregnant again, with our sixth child. This terrifies me for all the usual reasons — partly financial but mainly existential. How dare I condemn an innocent child to live in this world which is so appalling and then consign them forever, after death, to the abyss known as nothing?

The only other people with so many children in my neck of the woods here on Dante’s Beach, near Ravenna, are the gypsies (or whatever we are allowed to call them these days). Not even the Muslims (can we call them that any more?), as far as I can tell, have five, let alone six. Italy — where it is still common to meet old men called ‘-Decimo’ (Tenth) — has for decades now had the lowest birthrate in the world, more or less, at just over one child per woman.

But the situation is little better elsewhere in Europe. No European country’s birthrate is much above two children per woman. Indeed, the birthrate is so low and the age of death so high that there is absolutely no way Europe — especially Italy — can afford to pay for the health care and the pensions of its old without massive immigration, and those costs are just the tip of the iceberg.

So while overpopulation might well be an issue in somewhere like Mumbai, and everyone talks about that ad nauseam, in Europe the issue is the opposite and yet no one talks about it. Let’s not bugger about the bush here: European society nowadays is geared — culturally, socially and economically — only to promote its suicide. The extended family which used to provide so much back-up is dead, and the state has not replaced it in any useful way except perhaps in France, where the bill gets ever more unsustainable.

I have just read in the newspaperof an unemployed British woman who has 11 children and a 12th on the way and gets £38,000 a year in benefit. Not bad — not bad at all — all things considered. But in Italy, where I am self-employed, I am not entitled to a single euro of state help, or so they tell me, though I do get the odd pathetic tax break. I am sorely tempted to return to Britain and never work again. The one thing that puts me off is that a packet of 20 cigarettes now costs £8.50 in Britain, compared with £3.90 in Italy, where wine costs less than water.

Here’s the funny thing. During his latest in-flight utterance, en route from Manila to Rome, what Pope Francis actually expressed was a concern at the lack of children in Europe, especially in Italy. He said:‘I think the number of three children per family that you mentioned — it makes me suffer — I think it is the number experts say is important to keep the population going. Three per couple. When this decreases, the other extreme happens, like what is happening in Italy. I have heard, I do not know if it is true, that in 2024 there will be no money to pay pensioners because of the fall in population.’

It was then that he mentioned a Filipina woman whom he had met, who was expecting her eighth child after seven Caesarians; and said: ‘But does she want to leave the seven as orphans? This is to tempt God.’

He went on to describe children as ‘a treasure’, but also said: ‘God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that — excuse the word — in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No. Responsible parenthood. This is clear and that is why in the Church there are marriage groups … and I know so many ways that are licit.’

Well, I wish I did! But anyway, in my case, it is now of course too late. The dire deed is done. I try to convince myself that all my children are a resource, or even in my wildest moments an investment, and regardless of the money side I cannot deny that they are a treasure. Anyway, here’s a small example of why I just might be right, although I cannot for the life of me work out how it might translate into an every-day money-spinner unless I become a 21st-century version of Fagin.

Last summer, I was on the terrace in front of our small seaside house when my second daughter Magdalena, aged seven, came up to me and whispered in my ear: ‘Papa, a man has just opened the door of la Land- Rover and taken your macchina fotografica, look there he is.’ Our seven-seater Land Rover Defender was parked right opposite the house — no more than 20 yards away.

Needless to say I had seen nothing. ‘Follow him, bella,’ I whispered. ‘And take Rita with you.’ I then shouted: ‘Francesco Winston!’ My eldest son (nine) arrived fairly pronto. ‘Go up on to the roof immediatamente and watch that man and where he goes.’ Incredibly, he agreed.

I then deployed my weapon of mass destruction: my wife, Carla. ‘Follow Magda and Rita, someone’s got my camera. They’re on his tail.’ Like a bat out of hell she shot off, while I remained seated on the terrace to direct operations with my glass of Sangiovese. ‘Francesco, where is he now?’ I shouted up. ‘He’s just turned right towards the piazza,’ Francesco shouted down for the benefit of my wife. And so on. Within five minutes my wife, Magdalena and Rita (aged six) were back with my camera. I did not have to deploy Caterina, 11, let alone Giovanni Maria (three).

My take on children is this: what are we on this planet for? When Caterina was born in August 2003, I wrote a column which began: ‘Dear Caterina, Nothing I have ever done in my life nor will ever do again in what remains of my life is as important to me as your birth.’ What else is there to say?

As for Europe, if Europeans do not start breeding like rabbits again, then that’s it, Europe is dog meat. It’s the economy, stupid. There exists only one alternative: mass immigration at levels that would cause a heart attack not just to Nigel Farage but to Europe as we know it.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425781/the-benefits-of-breeding-like-a-rabbit/feed/67dv780037featuredOnly capitalism can save Nigeriahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425491/only-capitalism-can-save-nigeria/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9425491/only-capitalism-can-save-nigeria/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9425491Abuja was eerily quiet when I arrived. The capital of Nigeria is normally bustling, but that morning the wide boulevards were empty. The red dust was undisturbed; the call to… Read more

]]>Abuja was eerily quiet when I arrived. The capital of Nigeria is normally bustling, but that morning the wide boulevards were empty. The red dust was undisturbed; the call to prayer echoed through the city like the sad lament of the lonely. There is an election approaching, and a lot of people take that as their cue to leave the country. You’ll find much of Nigeria’s ruling class in the Harrods food hall at this time.

Although Abuja is far wealthier and more stable than most of Nigeria, its problems are representative of a country on the brink of disaster. Construction of the capital began in the 1970s, its layout heavily influenced by Milton Keynes. Today it is a mix of grand designs and organisational failure: my tour of the Ministry of Power was complicated by a power cut. Everywhere there are soldiers; every wall is laced with barbed wire to keep criminals and Islamists at bay. The government calculates that if the fanatics who control north-eastern Nigeria head south, then at least the army should be sure of holding Abuja. For it is entirely possible that when next month’s elections are over and the votes have been forged, the country could fall apart. It is a nation divided against itself, barely held together by a political system that many Nigerians regard as a joke. But while things are bad, the country is experimenting with reforms that offer a model for the rest of Africa. Its redemption lies in capitalism.

Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, thanks to oil; Lagos city, down south, is experiencing a golden age. Nigerians can get stuff done: Ebola isn’t a significant threat here because the country acted so efficiently. The people are friendly and natural entrepreneurs. The problem is that government competes with family and tribal loyalties that run deep. The Nigeria to which Britain gifted independence amounted to at least seven countries in one. In 1967, the southeastern part tried to secede — triggering the bloodthirsty Biafran war. If there have been no similar secessions until now, it is largely because that period of Nigerian history was so traumatic.

But the instability of the present is shown in the risk that a hitherto stable government might lose an election. President Goodluck Jonathan, a man with a passion for fedoras, and his running mate Namadi Sambo governed at a time when oil was above $110 a barrel — and achieved next to nothing. Now that oil is around $50 a barrel, patronage and ‘gifts’ are no longer enough to hold things together. Jonathan’s posters say that ‘Nigerians demand continuity’, which is as farfetched as saying that chickens demand to spend more time in the company of foxes. The president knows that, which is why he’s embraced economic modernisation. By contrast, you can tell supporters of the opposition because when they meet in the street they greet each other with a cry of ‘Change!’ Their candidate is the 72-year-old Muslim general Muhammadu Buhari, a former military dictator with a reputation for discipline.

Issue number one is security. The terrorist group Boko Haram now controls the northeast of the country and keeps the rest of Nigeria in terror. They used to target soldiers. Now they go for civilians. I saw a marketplace where a bomb went off a few months ago, killing dozens: the streets were littered, say the locals, with arms, legs and heads. It all happened next door to a mosque. Boko Haram is just as concerned with punishing Muslims for what it regards as theological deviation as it is with persecuting Christians. It recruits by kidnapping children and brainwashing them. The 200 Christian girls taken last year were most likely regarded as potential wives or even suicide bombers. Jonathan’s government promised to recapture the children but failed.

I’m told in whispers that rebels get their equipment from government soldiers selling it for food. Conspiracy theories abound that the administration benefits from the civil war continuing because it means that opposition voters in the northeast are disenfranchised. Certainly, it is odd that the army has been so much more active and successful at fighting terrorism in some places than others.

Issue number two is corruption. While the vast majority of the country is dirt poor and visibly malnourished, a few get rich out of exploiting contacts and demanding kickbacks. That’s apparent in the army. There the elite officers live like kings, sending their children to English public schools. A junior officer, meanwhile, makes around £350 a month, or less, to fight fanatics. Support is growing for Buhari and his promise to clean things up. Whoever loses, they’ll contest the result in courts and the streets. These are conditions that classically support a military coup.

In short, Nigeria has to be delivered from its own government. Happily, that’s starting to happen. One rare economic achievement has been the privatisation of the telecommunications industry — its success is obvious in the fact that everyone in Abuja has a mobile phone and millions are on Facebook. Now the government has sold off its power supply, and it’s done so with the help of the UK.

We usually think of international development as charity: Bono laying wells in the desert. But in Nigeria, the Department for International Development has been far more flexible and savvy. For example, it’s persuaded the northern city of Karno to reduce the number of local taxes from 200 to 17. The Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility programme has also guided the largest privatisation in African history in the power sector. As the government moves from being a supplier of power to a regulator, so the investment switches from taxes that are misappropriated and misspent to private money that — by dint of being someone’s personal fortune — is far more likely to be well managed. There is little discipline in a Nigerian bureaucracy rife with corruption. But there is discipline in the marketplace, where competition leads to ruthless efficiency, and failure to bankruptcy.

The frustrating thing is that British business isn’t exploiting the opportunities it has opened up. Nigerians don’t understand why the UK government helps to liberate their economy, yet it’s the Americans and Chinese who offer the investment. Sometimes, perhaps, the Brits are a little too nice for their own good. We are encouraging the growth of solar energy in the north through programmes like Solar Nigeria — a brilliant idea because one thing they have no shortage of is sunshine. But as someone complained to me, the British tend to sell the idea as an environmental thing and most Nigerians couldn’t care less about rescuing the polar bear. They would jump at the project if they were convinced that it would make them money.

Britain has to get this right, if only for selfish reasons. Diplomatic sources estimates that some 2.5 million Nigerians would have a right of residence in the UK in the event of a coup or war. But also we owe it to those Nigerians who suffer under the present system. It is possible after only a few days in Abuja to get very angry indeed. Angry at the naked corruption of traffic police who take advantage of the lack of lighting to leap out of the dark and shake down a bribe. Angry at the disparity between enormous officials and skinny children picking through bins. Angry too with an upper class that seems to approach life with a deadening irony — as if the whole enterprise is some cosmic joke from which only they profit.

But one can’t let one’s fury boil because it’s already too darned hot and one has to have faith in the capacity of people to survive. On a Sunday morning, women in elegant dresses walk through the middle of the oncoming traffic towards church, oblivious to the danger around them. The average Nigerian’s sheer strength of will is -astonishing.

]]>In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’.

But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the facts.

Any success I’ve had in my first year and a half at Magdalen College, I owe to the fact that I have no qualms about taking this approach. My highest-marked essays include ones which argue that Martin Luther was a fraud, that Second Wave American feminists were profoundly sexist and that King Alfred the Great was a historical irrelevance.

In another essay, I said that the Counter-Reformation was a success because the Catholics were so flexible, tolerant and easy-going — I didn’t mention the Inquisition once. Saying it was ‘completely wrong, but a delight to read’, my tutor gave it a First.

The same tutor recommended Fernand Braudel’s seminal 1949 tome, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, as the greatest history book of all time — while adding, as a cheery side-note, that he was sure Braudel had made all the facts up.

The list of historians who’ve been led by their imaginations as much as their sources is distinguished. In the 1960s, John Prebble’s reconstructions of the great disasters of Scottish history were blood-soaked bestsellers. His vivid narratives brought to life first the rainy, desolate moor that staged the Battle of Culloden, then the betrayal, disease and starvation of the Highland Clearances. Prebble was described by the current chair of history at Glasgow University as the man who ‘had interested more people than anyone this century in Scottish history’. But he’s still dismissed by most academics as a glorified historical novelist.

The young Niall Ferguson was the inspiration for Irwin, the provocative history teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. He taught his pupils to make tutors sit up and take notice by arguing (to use one of Ferguson’s real-life examples) that Britain should have sat out the first world war and left the Germans to battle it out.

At the end of Bennett’s play, one of Irwin’s less able students recounts the arguments that got him through his Oxford interview: that ‘Stalin was a sweetie and Wilfred Owen was a wuss’. Lines like that would still get you into Oxford today.

And if bestselling history books are about one parts fact to two parts fiction, it’s because that’s the ratio that most historians have to work with. Starkey may consider himself to be ‘someone who actually knows what happened’ in Henry VIII’s court, but the truth is he doesn’t — no one does. If Wolf Hall had been written based on facts alone, it would be a tenth as long and even less interesting. A scrupulously honest historian has to leave gaps, or add caveats until his reader died of boredom.

Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII in Wolf Hall Photo: BBC

There are, of course, grave historical sins. To speculate is one thing, but to deliberately lie is quite another. David Irving deserves no admiration for his manipulation of the evidence surrounding second world war: losing his libel case, he was found to have ‘for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence’. Creatively joining the few dots of knowledge we have about the past is the historian’s craft, and it takes skill. Writing something you know to be untrue because it fits your story takes no skill, and is the point where history becomes fiction.

To return to Alan Bennett, ‘History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It’s a performance. It’s entertainment. And if it isn’t, make it so.’ For future history students, I have just one piece of advice: put down E.H. Carr’s What is History — all you need is The History Boys.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9426081/wolf-hall-is-a-work-of-the-imagination-like-all-the-best-history/feed/56Ep6featuredGlasgow School of Arthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9427501/the-long-ordeal-of-mackintoshs-glasgow-school-of-art/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9427501/the-long-ordeal-of-mackintoshs-glasgow-school-of-art/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9427501I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent in Suffolk — when news came in that his… Read more

]]>I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent in Suffolk — when news came in that his most famous architectural creation, The Glasgow School of Art, was on fire. My heart lurched. This was an unimaginable tragedy, not just for Glasgow, but for Britain. Students were weeping in the street. I struggled not to cry myself. Poor old Mac (as the Suffolk locals called him). He’d had enough bad luck already.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a student at the Glasgow School of Art in 1895 when a competition to design a new art school was announced. He was also a junior assistant at the architectural firm of Honeyman and Keppie, and it was on behalf of this firm, at the age of 28, that he won the commission to create the building that would define him.

There followed three frenzied years of work. The budget, at £15,000, was impossibly small, but Mackintosh considered it his job to make sure every last detail of his vision was adhered to. Electric light was installed — the first building in Glasgow to have it — and electric clocks in every studio. By 1899 the central and eastern parts of the building were complete, but the money had run out. Rather than wait to raise the rest, it was accepted that the school should open as it was. There was much fanfare, and a dinner to which Messrs Honeyman and Keppie were invited; but of Mackintosh there was no mention. Hurt as he was, he was not daunted. ‘I hope when brighter days come I shall be able to work for myself entirely and claim my work as mine,’ he told a friend. Over the next few years, while the money was being raised for the second phase of the school, he worked tirelessly.

It was 1907 before enough was raised. But finally on 15 December 1909 the two parts of the school were officially joined. It was said in the opening speech that Mackintosh would deserve well of his generation, ‘were it only because he had made them think’. But at least this time he was acknowledged as the architect, even if in the local paper it suggested he should have his bare arse whipped for putting such an eyesore in the centre of the city.

One would have thought with this extraordinary building to his name, Mackintosh would have been inundated with work, but after its completion everything went quiet. ‘You were born too late, that’s all it is,’ a colleague told him, ‘your place was among the 15th-century lot with Leonardo and the others.’ Although this idea cheered him, it did nothing to help his predicament and eventually he fell ill, and was advised to head for Suffolk and its healing sea air. He would not have imagined it then, but he was never to build anything again; the Glasgow School of Art was to be his first and last major commission. He died in London in 1928, his entire estate valued at £88, 16s, 2d.

But slowly, over the decades, his reputation has grown, his genius acknowledged, so that when news spread of the fire there were not only tears, but pledges of money. The restoration could take years and cost tens of millions, but such is the value of this building that it is considered to be worth every penny. By the end of this decade it is hoped the school will open once again, a working art school for the most talented and innovative students, just as Mackintosh had dreamed it.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9427501/the-long-ordeal-of-mackintoshs-glasgow-school-of-art/feed/1Glasgow-School-of-ArtfeaturedGagging orderhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421892/im-a-stand-up-comic-why-do-politicians-want-my-job/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421892/im-a-stand-up-comic-why-do-politicians-want-my-job/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9421892Something funny is happening in this country. Our comedians are becoming politicians and our politicians are becoming comedians — and public life is turning into an endless stream of jokes.… Read more

]]>Something funny is happening in this country. Our comedians are becoming politicians and our politicians are becoming comedians — and public life is turning into an endless stream of jokes. Last week, the comedian Al Murray announced that he would be standing at the next general election in the constituency of South Thanet, the same seat that Nigel Farage is contesting. Al Murray performs in the persona of ‘The Pub Landlord’. A sexist reactionary, never pictured without a beer in his hand, forever declaiming ‘common-sense’ solutions to Britain’s problems, Nigel Farage has welcomed the additional competition. Murray has refused to say what, if any, serious intentions lie behind his announcement — and election pundits are unsure whether it will benefit Farage, by splitting the anti-Ukip vote, or hobble his campaign by taking away voters attracted to Ukip’s anti-politics stance. And it may just come down to revenge on a man who stole his shtick. But, as with Rufus Hound standing for the National Health Action Party in the European elections, and Eddie Izzard dropping hints about the London mayoral race in 2020, it is indicative of a new trend.

Politicians, meanwhile, are travelling in the opposite direction, and it’s easy to see why. Britain’s two most successful politicians, Farage and Boris Johnson, are entertainers above all else. They rely on jokes, or rather jokiness, rather than their track records for appeal. They seem able to laugh off gaffes that would sink more ‘serious’ politicians. David Cameron and Ed Miliband are desperate to show their lighter sides, and Prime Minister’s questions is now not about who can win the argument but who can deliver the best zinger at the dispatch box. In last week’s PMQs, the only debate between the party leaders concerned the forthcoming debate between the party leaders, and who should be allowed to take part. It is unsurprising that the post-match analysis was mainly around who had the better line about the other’s cowardice. Ed Miliband lost points since the keyword in his punchline — ‘he is frit’ — relied on the audience recalling a comment made by Mrs Thatcher to Denis Healey in 1983. Having said that, the Prime Minister had already used the word ‘chicken’, so Miliband couldn’t use the joke he had prepared and which he wheeled out a couple of days later: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? To avoid the TV election debates.’ Would that quip would have made the difference at PMQs? It is impossible to tell.

Boris Johnson stuck on a zip wire in Victoria Park.

There’s nothing new about politicians dabbling in comedy — Labour’s Gerald Kaufman wrote for That Was the Week that Was; Ian Lang, John Major’s minister for trade, was in the Cambridge Footlights; and Tony Blair did a few gigs as a stand-up when he was at Oxford — but the idea that being a comedian could, of itself, qualify a person for public office is new. And it is not unique to Britain: the former Saturday Night Live writer Al Franken is one of the senators for Minnesota; Icelandic stand-up Jón Gnarr last year finished his term as mayor of Reykjavík; and the Italian comedian Beppe -Grillo is leader of the largest opposition party in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.

It has never been the British tradition, however, that making jokes disqualifies one for public office, which was once the case in America. At the same time as James Garfield’s political adviser insisted that he must ‘never make the people laugh. If you would be succeed in life you must be solemn, solemn as an ass’ — advice from which the 20th US President never wavered — Benjamin Disraeli was making some of the best jokes ever heard in British politics. (When told by another member of Parliament that he would either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease, he replied, ‘That depends, sir, whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.’)

But there was always a sense that jokes were only one weapon available to the parliamentarian. G.K. Chesterton, writing in 1911 about ‘a young and rising politician’, described how he had mastered the secret of public speaking: ‘When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.’ And for a long time these remained the basic tactics: when William Hague, as Conservative party leader, fired off a wisecrack against Tony Blair, and Blair did not have a comeback ready, he would dismiss Hague as ‘good jokes, bad judgment’, turning Hague’s great strength into a weakness. And Hague’s facility with a joke never translated into any threat to Tony Blair’s position in the polls.

But as time has passed, we have begun to prize what Chesterton called ‘brilliance’ — or, at least, the ability to fashion a one-liner — above ability. In part, this focus on a sense of humour is a reflection of the narrowing of political differences: when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, it didn’t matter whether Michael Foot was wittier or Neil Kinnock made better jokes (never a high bar to vault anyway), since so much else was at stake. But when politics ceases to be a battle of ideas, it doesn’t take long for it to descend into an entertainment contest.

This trend, for politics to be reduced to who has the best jokes, has been exacerbated by social media. The chief executive of Twitter has claimed that the maximum length of a tweet — 140 characters — was chosen as being the length of the perfect joke; and while this has no grounding in truth whatsoever, it is true that 140 characters is enough for a joke, and not for a sustained political argument. A joke doesn’t have to be that good to go viral — Russell Brand’s description of Nigel Farage as a ‘pound-shop Enoch Powell’ during his last appearance on Question Time, and variations on that tired formula, filled my Twitter timeline for a week, before being replaced by Ed Balls’s description of Brand as a ‘pound-shop Ben Elton’ — but a snappy joke is going to have a far greater reach than a line of reasoning that cannot even fit into a tweet.

Moreover, the effect of a decent joke will be amplified. Consider two of the best jokes made in US presidential debates — the first, by Ronald Reagan in his debate against Walter Mondale in the 1984 campaign, in which questions had been raised about his ability to govern at the age of 73: ‘I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.’ (At 139 characters long, very nearly the perfect joke.) While it was a great line, it didn’t win the election for Reagan, as Mondale later claimed; but it did prevent him losing it because of his age, and the campaign focused on the economic recovery, where he had the advantage.

When, 28 years later, Mitt Romney attacked President Obama for not prioritising national defence, Obama replied, ‘You mention the navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.’ (141 characters.) Again, a great joke, and an effective joke — John Kerry believed that it ‘sank Romney’s battleship’ — and it was widely repeated. And easily expanded with what comedians call ‘a topper’ — a hundred pictures of cavalry charges, from sources varying from the Bayeux Tapestry to the film War Horse, superimposed with captions like ‘Romney’s military’, spread before the two candidates had left the stage — so that a somewhat abstruse point about American naval strength became a widespread symbol of the Republican’s hopelessness.

The main reason, however, that jokes have become such a big part of politics is that political comedy has become such a big part of politics. It may have waned since the satire boom of the 1960s, when Peter Cook worried that Britain was in danger of ‘sinking giggling into the sea’; and it is still not as ubiquitous as it was under Thatcher. But Have I Got News for You still has ratings roughly twice as high as those of Question Time — unless, of course, the latter has Russell Brand as a guest.

And the most successful contemporary politicians are those who have accepted this, and become part of the process. It is not just that Boris Johnson has appeared on Have I Got News for You — he has, in effect, done the comedians’ job for them by caricaturing himself so brilliantly. Gerard Mulligan, who led David Letterman’s writing team, believes that ‘most [political] comedy is based on reducing somebody to two characteristics and ignoring the rest’, and Boris seems to have understood this. Rather than waiting for two characteristics to emerge from what he said and did, Boris presents a character — dishevelled, bumbling — which is immediately absorbed into the culture.

It is not just that the self-caricature is appealing; it also affects the way that his critics are characterised. If he is a character from Wodehouse — and with every stutter and ‘piffle’ he self-consciously reinforces this image — then anyone criticising him for his lack of attention to detail is forced into the role of Aunt Agatha ticking off Bertie Wooster. Likewise with Nigel Farage: the more he plays up to the role of Arthur Daley — and no one would choose to wear that coat unless he were playing Arthur Daley — the stronger the impression that his critics are nothing more than the tedious and joyless policemen from Minder. These are comic archetypes; caricatures used to be a commentary on mainstream politics, now, they are the mainstream politics. Perhaps that is the point of Al Murray’s intervention in South Thanet — the only way to defeat a comedy character is with another, better, funnier comedy character.

I like jokes; I write and perform them for a living. But I do not believe in Orwell’s idea that every joke is a tiny revolution. Most jokes, especially political jokes, are essentially conservative, reinforcing the ideas and prejudices of the listener; if they did not rely on shared premises, they would not work. But politics is pointless if we can’t move on from the beliefs we share with our tribe and reinforce through tweets to people who follow us anyway. The strange blurring of politics and comedy only makes people more disengaged, since our only response to a joke is to laugh, or not, and no one is prepared to say that this is no time for trifling. But every routine must come to an end; at some point, we will all stop laughing.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421892/im-a-stand-up-comic-why-do-politicians-want-my-job/feed/22coverimagefeaturedTony’s toxic legacyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421812/blame-tony-blair-for-labours-new-stupidity-about-wealth/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421812/blame-tony-blair-for-labours-new-stupidity-about-wealth/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9421812Peter Mandelson’s famous quote about New Labour being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich has a suffix that is often mischievously omitted: he added ‘so long as they pay… Read more

]]>Peter Mandelson’s famous quote about New Labour being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich has a suffix that is often mischievously omitted: he added ‘so long as they pay their taxes’.

But there are a few more things which many Labour members would have put on the end: so long as you don’t earn it by advising Central Asian dictatorships, so long as you don’t hang around with Russian oligarchs, so long as you don’t make it from the Saudis.

Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson got filthy rich all right. But the whiff they gave off while doing so has only served to regenerate a very Old Labour disgust of wealth. This week, Peter Mandelson became the latest Labour figure to criticise Ed Balls’s mansion tax, calling it ‘crude’ and ‘short-termist’. The issue threatens to spark a Labour civil war over envy politics and wealth. The painstaking efforts of Tony Blair to turn his party from a socialist one to a socially democratic one, to convince the faithful that profit is not a dirty word but the source of the tax revenues which pay for social programmes, are in danger of ultimately showing for nothing.

In Ed’s Labour, profit once again seems to be something you bring in on your shoe. The default position is anti-business: enterprise is a problem which has to be contained, not the lifeblood of the economy. Miliband has no one with business experience, just lawyers and professional politicians.

For Tony Blair, it is a case of all that hard work — gone. All those aspirational voters frightened away again. He must have felt some sadness as he predicted, in a recent interview, that the coming election would be one where ‘a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’.

But then he might reflect that he shares some of the blame for the turnaround in Labour’s attitude to wealth. Imagine that you are a young Labour activist still forming your opinions, trying to reconcile grubby capitalism with socialist ideals and find your personal third way. There are lots of enterprises which you might identify with as combining profit with a sense of what Blair used to call ‘social justice’. You might be drawn to social media, for example: no workers or animals harmed in that. Or you might look to green energy: who would begrudge a small fortune to someone who comes up with a practical way to slash carbon emissions? Or ethical tourism, or a fair-trade supermarket.

What probably won’t feature in your idea of the acceptable face of capitalism is Tony Blair Associates, not with its £8 million in fees from advising Kazakhstan dictator Nursultan Nazarbeyev. You will balk even more to learn that Blair, a great champion of efforts to combat climate change, is raking it in from the oil industry; not only that, but through ventures with autocratic governments in Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia.

What especially offends about Blair’s new career as a roving adviser to some of the world’s least democratic governments is the sense that he is exploiting contacts which he made as prime minister. There is a provision by which former prime ministers must clear business interests with parliamentary authorities, but it only lasts two years.

Blair may argue that, now the period is up, he is as entitled to make hay as any other citizen. But then if he considers himself just another private citizen, why is he still claiming a £115,000 a year allowance to help him fulfil his duties as a former prime minister? He wants to rid himself of all constraints and yet still enjoy the trappings of his former office. That is having your Kazakhstani fried honey cake and eating it.

It is as if Edward Heath had gone on to make a mint in the international panda trade, or Jim Callaghan had gone off to promote the Mustique tourist business. No one has found anything illegal in what Blair is up to, but somehow it still doesn’t seem right.

If I were a Kazakhstan taxpayer I think I would feel still less impressed. Blair has forged a career in a profession which he helped to create: that of the highly paid outside consultant to government. His business is not quite private sector and not quite public sector but in a strange nowhereland between the two. Think of all those council executives, all those NHS managers who left with large pay-offs and then appeared back, as consultants at thousands a day, in what looked remarkably like their old jobs.

No wonder Labour’s faithful have once again taken against private enterprise. The man who tried so hard to sell it to them has gone on to espouse one of its less attractive sides: private enrichment from public administration, and from dictatorships to boot.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421812/blame-tony-blair-for-labours-new-stupidity-about-wealth/feed/40Former Prime Minister Tony Blair Gives Evidence To The Leveson InquiryfeaturedUni’s outhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420622/why-tomorrows-parents-wont-want-their-children-to-go-to-university/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420622/why-tomorrows-parents-wont-want-their-children-to-go-to-university/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9420622Could the current generation of parents be the first ones who won’t want their children to go to university? Until now that mortarboard photo on the sideboard has always been… Read more

]]>Could the current generation of parents be the first ones who won’t want their children to go to university? Until now that mortarboard photo on the sideboard has always been the dream, visual proof that your offspring have munched their way to the top of the educational food chain. Advancement by degree. But that was before tuition fees. Now there’s a price tag attached to your little one’s ‘ology’ (to quote Maureen Lipman in those BT ads), how many people will automatically see it as a good thing? Perhaps more of us will refuse to prostrate ourselves before the great god Uni? If so, that can only be a good thing.

I attended Manchester University between 1989 and 1992. Given those three years again, I wouldn’t bother — I’d get straight to work. Or rather straight back to work: after school I’d spent a year as an office junior, earning a few quid and discovering what this thing called ‘employment’ was all about. Perhaps that’s why I found university so frustrating — it was a return to school but without the uniform. There was a feeling of life being on hold, the knowledge, even as you crammed for your latest exam, that as soon as the exam was over your brain was going to jettison the material for ever. The chances of it coming in useful later were zero. University was really just a box to be ticked, something you did because everybody else did it, or at least everybody who had good enough A-level grades. Sure, conventional wisdom painted it as an ‘investment in your future’, a ‘valuable addition to your CV’, and lots of other phrases designed to cover up the truth, namely that university is a way of delaying real life for three years while you fanny around with traffic cones and tequila.

‘Yes,’ comes the standard response, ‘but university teaches you about living away from home.’ You get the same lesson if you move out and start working. Plus you’re earning money, so enabling you to have some real fun, rather than the sort that involves collecting together all your loose change before deciding whether you can afford that tricky third pint. Now students have to find nine grand a year in tuition fees on top of their kebab money, surely more school-leavers will see sense and head for the workplace rather than the dreaming spires?

This isn’t to say that no one needs university. If your job’s going to involve you operating on people’s brains or designing buildings safe enough for them to live in, then clearly you need some training. But the rest of us — really? Did we honestly learn anything at uni other than hangover cures? I studied politics, and when my second year coincided with the single most fascinating political event of recent decades (the fall of Margaret Thatcher) I learned a hell of a lot — by reading newspapers and listening to the radio. English graduates: it was three years of being allowed to read Jane Austen during office hours, wasn’t it? History graduates: ditto with Simon Schama. Geography graduates… actually, what do you do on a geography degree?

For a few years yet, university will have a snob value built into it. Most employers nabbed their degrees when they were free (that is, paid for with other people’s taxes), and so will look down on any applicant whose name isn’t followed by those two or three little letters. But more and more the positions of power will come to be occupied by people whose degrees cost them a packet, who’ll have first-hand experience of questioning whether that money actually bought them anything. ‘You must go to university,’ their parents told them. ‘Then you’ll always have the qualification to fall back on.’ Instead of being a safety net, though, the degree of the future will be a millstone, sapping your wage packet for decades as you repay your student debt. Let’s see how long the mortarboard retains its sheen then.

The other factor — and the reason the state can no longer afford to fund degrees in the first place — is that the number of people taking them has risen so astronomically. This in itself will help remove the false mystique from the phrase ‘university-educated’. Did you attend the University of South Lincolnshire (formerly Sleaford Kindergarten)? Then you might as well not have bothered. Instead of asking ‘Did you go to university?’, employers will ask ‘Which university did you go to?’ And if you need help with the correct answers to that, think back to the episode of Yes, Minister when Sir Humphrey says that the universities have to be protected — ‘both of them’.

This assumes that employers will even ask about your education. Some (The Spectator among them) already ask would-be interns to remove it from their CV, preferring to assess candidates on their ideas for the job and how they present them, rather than on a list of academic qualifications. I predict that more and more companies will follow suit. This isn’t an anti-university argument in itself — it could be that those employers still believe a degree makes you a better prospect, but don’t want to prejudice their decision. Perhaps, perhaps not. Similarly school-leavers might genuinely view a degree as a worthwhile investment rather than a necessary line on their CV — but if they’re no longer allowed to include that line, will they still bet 30 grand on it?

If you want a one-line argument on the issue, it’s that Neil Kinnock went to university but Winston Churchill didn’t. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock for a thousand generations,’ asked the Ginger Gasbag, ‘to be able to get to university?’ Well, Neil, the oldest one in this country is Oxford, established just over 900 years ago, and that’s about 50 generations, tops. Clearly university doesn’t do much for your maths.

All the people I’ve ever heard expressing regret at not going to university are perfect examples of why you don’t need to. They’ve all achieved massively in their own fields, largely because they understand human nature and are good at dealing with people (any technical knowledge you need for a job is best learned on the job). Why does ‘education’ have to mean an institution? Life is its own education, as well as its own exam. Sure, you need school to set you up with the basics, but university is about narrowing everything down to the one subject you really want to devote yourself to — and how can you possibly know what that is at 18? A friend of mine has got it the right way round: after a long and successful career in the City he’s now planning, in his early sixties, to take a degree. University isn’t just wasted on the young — it’s a waste of your youth.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420622/why-tomorrows-parents-wont-want-their-children-to-go-to-university/feed/84dv1850052featuredGay righthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420662/how-marine-le-pen-is-winning-frances-gay-vote/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420662/how-marine-le-pen-is-winning-frances-gay-vote/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9420662A week before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, France’s leading gay magazine, Têtu, announced the winner of its annual beauty contest. His name was Matthieu Chartraire, and he was 22,… Read more

]]>A week before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, France’s leading gay magazine, Têtu, announced the winner of its annual beauty contest. His name was Matthieu Chartraire, and he was 22, doe-eyed and six-packed, with perfectly groomed hair, stubble and eyebrows. A pin-up in every way — until he started talking.

To the anger of many of the magazine’s readers, the Adonis of 2015 turns out to be an outspoken supporter of the Front National. Têtu’s editor-in-chief, Yannick Barbe, refused to play censor. ‘It’s within his rights to vote for the FN even if we don’t share his beliefs,’ he said. ‘This is a beauty pageant, and our readers’ vote was only based on a single criterion! He only stands for himself and not for the gay community.’

Barbe has a point (although from next year, it’s worth noting, entrants for Têtu’s beauty contest will have to sign a code of ethics that rejects discrimination). But his assertion that Chartraire does not stand for the gay community overlooks a trend that has been accelerating over the last decade: French gay votersare falling for the Front National’s leader, Marine Le Pen. A survey by the polling firm Ifop indicates a dramatic increase in support for the FN among homosexual and bisexual voters since the French presidential elections of April 2012. It showed, for instance, that in Paris 26 per cent of homosexuals supported Le Pen, compared with 16 per cent of hetero-sexuals.

‘After the financial crisis started you could tell that a switch [to the far right] was happening across the nation. But the fact that it was happening in the gay community was particularly telling,’ Didier Lestrade, a gay activist who has written a book on the subject, tells me. ‘We knew that not all gay people are from the left. Even so, it was hard for my generation [he is 56] to believe that anti-Arab and anti-black opinions were starting to pop up on apps like Grindr and Cruise.’

An insight into the phenomenon comes from Patrick McCarthy, a young gay blogger who lives in Bordeaux. ‘Up until 2005, Bordeaux was a very gay-friendly city,’ he says. ‘Same-sex couples could openly walk down the street holding hands without any problems. However, in the space of two months, five gay men were murdered in the city. The blame was put on Bordeaux’s Muslim community since some of these hate crimes were carried out by people of Arabic origins.’

The Bordeaux gay scene has dwindled since the attacks, but McCarthy says that he, like Lestrade, is alarmed at the way that assaults by a few Arabs have created a major polemical opposition between gays and Muslims. The Front National now offers a welcoming home to gay people who feel judged by Muslims and share wider concerns about immigration and the loss of French identity.

That gay men now feel comfortable with the Front National is the result of a deliberate effort by its leader, Marine Le Pen, who has pursued a programme of detoxification (the French term is ‘de-diabolisation’) ever since she took control of the party in 2011. Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, who led the FN from its founding in 1972 until Marine took over, described homosexuality as a ‘biological and social anomaly’. In the 1980s he argued that all individuals with Aids should be kept in isolation, and in the 1990s was still declaring that ‘There are no queens in the National Front.’

By contrast, Marine has worked hard to expand the FN’s membership beyond obvious bigots, racists and skinheads. She has publicly condemned anti-Semitism and insists that, far from being racist, her party is the only one that defends secularity and democracy against Islamisation. A key part of this strategy is using the Islamist threat to court the sort of people that the far right has traditionally persecuted. It’s working. In the 2012 presidential elections, Le Pen won 13.5 per cent of the Jewish vote. A surprising enough statistic, but her appeal to gay activists has created even more waves. Just before Christmas, her deputy Florian Philippot was outed as gay by Closer: the same magazine that exposed Hollande’s affair with Julie Gayet. Around the same time, Le Pen appointed a new adviser: Sébastien Chenu, one of the founders of the activist organisation GayLib. FN traditionalists complained loudly that their party was being taken over by a gay cabal. (Those complaining included Marine’s 25-year-old niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, an MP and a rising star in the party.)

What, beyond support against the threat of Islamic fundamentalists, does Marine Le Pen’s FN claim to offer to a gay political activist? Officially Le Pen does not support the legalisation of gay marriage, which the French government passed last year. But like other far right leaders in Europe, notably Geert Wilders of Holland’s Freedom party, she sees the value of the gay vote. When huge demonstrations were held against gay marriage in Paris in 2013, she refused to take part. She seems able to walk the conceptual tightrope between what her party’s old membership wants and what its potential members need to hear. Her response to the outing of Philipott was to attack Closer and change the subject: ‘Florian Philippot is entitled to a private life as much as François Hollande,’ she said.

Switching attention back to the hapless president was a shrewd move. Hollande’s dismal popularity ratings (at the end of last year they sank to 12 per cent, the lowest recorded score for a sitting president) also contribute to the Front National’s success. Although Hollande pushed through the legalisation of gay marriage last year, many left-wing gay voters were disappointed that he failed to give the bill his personal support until the last minute. The centre-right UMP, meanwhile, issued a legal challenge the moment the bill had been approved by vote. Even critics such as Lestrade recognise that the FN offers more to ambitious young gay political activists than the more mainstream parties. ‘I think if you are gay, you’re going to make a difference there in a way you won’t get a chance to in the Socialist party or the UMP,’ he says.

Bruno Clavet is an out and proud gay activist for the FN. A politics graduate and a former underwear model, he tells me that when he was 18 he worked for Nicolas Sarkozy during the 2007 presidential election, but switched to the FN just before the most recent one. I ask him if it troubles him that his party has a strong anti-gay past. ‘I don’t think the FN is anti-gay,’ he replies. ‘We are against ghettoisation [into racial or sexual communities]. For me there is only one community, it’s the national community — the French people.’ This is the new spirit of French nationalism, one that resonates loudly in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420662/how-marine-le-pen-is-winning-frances-gay-vote/feed/244FRANCE-POLITICS-FN-LEPENfeaturedThe war on fraternitieshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421232/the-war-on-frat-culture/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421232/the-war-on-frat-culture/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9421232 New York It’s a new semester and a new start at the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, once encouraged America’s youth to ‘come and drink of the… Read more

It’s a new semester and a new start at the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, once encouraged America’s youth to ‘come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternise with us’. But this term, any student who fancies a swig from the cup of knowledge had better be sure it doesn’t contain any unauthorised alcohol — in fact he should beware fraternising at all, especially in a ‘frat house’, for fear of breaking the strict new rules.

It’ll seem incredible to fans of the 1978 film Animal House, but at the University of Virginia, one of the heartlands of America’s famous ‘Greek’ system, the chilly hand of authority has clamped down on frat-house life. All those single-sex student houses with names like Alpha Tau and Chi Phi, once the scene of capers involving beer, shaving foam, puking and cheerleaders, have been asked to sign a contract which for them amounts to a death warrant.

New rules ban beer kegs and pre-mixed drinks from parties. The drinks must only be poured by three uninebriated undergrads acting as ‘sober monitors’. These monitors must have keys to every room and are under orders to stop anyone going upstairs to bedrooms. Such venerable frat traditions as ‘beer pong’ (a drinking game: look it up) or the more esoteric wheeze of pumping red wine up your rectum are probably out of the question now. You can see why the frat boys are peeved — a frat house that cannot throw a debauched party is like a bird that cannot fly.

The University of Virginia’s stated reason for disciplining ‘Greek’ students appeared in Rolling Stone in November. The magazine published a shocking 9,000-word exposé of an appalling incident at one of the university’s frat houses, Phi Kappa Psi. A female first-year student, identified only as Jackie, recounted to the article’s author a tale of having been gang-raped by seven men during a party two years earlier. After being lured into a pitch-dark room, she said, she faced a three-hour ordeal which appeared to be some sort of initiation rite. (Her attackers referred to her as ‘it’.) Why the two-year wait to tell her story? Because, she said, when she told her friends at the time, they asked her not to rock the boat — they wanted to get into Phi Kappa Psi themselves.

Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on the University of Virginia campus Photo: Getty

When it came out, the Rolling Stone story caused a to-do across America. The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house was attacked by a mob and had its windows smashed. But the tale had one weakness — it may not have been true. Anxious to tell this harrowing story, the article’s writer hadn’t talked to many of the central characters, including the accused (who weren’t named but could have been identified). When other reporters investigated, the local police said there was no indication that Jackie had been raped at the frat house, although it is possible she was attacked somewhere else. Rolling Stone grovelled and anti-rape campaigning groups, who’d made great hay with the story, were furious, claiming their cause had been set back decades.

So why is the University of Virginia still squeezing the Greeks? Why aren’t the frat boys and girls free once more, out from the cloud of opprobrium, gambolling happily in pools of beer and vomit?

Well, what was most telling about the Rolling Stone story was just how ready people were to believe it. American campuses have become more puritanical in recent years, and with this new sober mindset has come a feeling that the Greek system is an anomaly. Several universities have banned the fraternities and sororities altogether, with others demanding that they sign pledges similar to the one at Virginia.

Stories are told of inter-frat violence, sexual assaults and underage drinking on an industrial scale. Lawsuits — along with the damaging headlines — are stacking up. Since 2005 more than 60 people have died in fraternity-related incidents. Many more have been badly injured, raped or traumatised. A fair few frat members are seriously hurt in initiation rituals. Most of them, rather worryingly, seem to be fixated on the initiate’s buttocks. Several ‘pledges’, as aspiring members are called, have been beaten to death in hazings. The most recent death, last year, involved a young student who was left blindfolded, possibly barefoot, with no phone and little water in a remote area of a California national forest. He died from heatstroke during the 18-mile hike to civilisation.

But hazing accounts for a small minority of accidents. Many of the victims are outsiders who just end up coming to harm in the anything-goes frat party environment. A common tragedy is people falling out of the windows of ‘sleeping porches’, an upper floor communal dormitory in most frat houses filled with three-tier bunk beds. For some no doubt character-building reason, windows are always left open even in freezing temperatures. During an amorous tryst at a University of Idaho frat house, a girl rolled off the top bunk and straight out of a second-floor window. The 25ft fall on to concrete left her brain-damaged and needing a wheelchair.

Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that the university chose to crack on with its crackdown, despite the inconsistencies in the Rolling Stone story. But on the other hand, there is a positive side to Greek life. Frats aren’t merely an attempt to mimic the high-living antics of snotty British student drinking clubs such as the Bullingdon. The first proper frat formed in 1825 in an obscure upstate New York college as a reaction to the university system’s puritan work ethic. Partly based on the Freemasons, the Kappa Alpha Society had its own secret rituals as well as an interest in literature and Ancient Greek culture. The idea rapidly caught on around America. They got their priorities sorted quickly, it seems: ‘I got one of the nicest pieces of ass some day or two ago,’ a Sigma Phi member wrote to one of his frat brothers in 1857.

Today, most Supreme Court judges and Fortune 500 company bosses are former frat members, as are many US presidents, senators and athletes. Frat supporters say they foster leadership and public service, as well as raising millions of dollars for charity and providing many hours of community service. Quite apart from that, Greek alumni tend to be generous donors to their universities. Cynics say America’s multi-billion-dollar higher education industry, which charges huge sums for places, needs to make college years sound fun if it’s to keep attracting students.

So the Greeks push on, swimming against the tide, and if the zeitgeist is against them now, at least the new student intake isn’t. Every year for the past decade, the number of frat members has increased 4 per cent, and even after all the fuss at Virginia and the Rolling Stone story, this year the number of women choosing to ‘rush’ sororities on campus is at a record high.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9421232/the-war-on-frat-culture/feed/8Fraternity house exteriorfeaturedLapsing into a commahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420432/how-to-stop-being-scared-of-full-stops/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420432/how-to-stop-being-scared-of-full-stops/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9420432Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let… Read more

]]>Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let me know if you need me to help tomorrow… xx’

Emails and texts like this, flitting across the ether in their thousands, demonstrate the free-flowing currency of helpfulness — mother going the extra mile for mother, in her Volvo, every day — in school-run land. But have you noticed the appalling punctuation? The use of the ‘weak comma’, or ‘splice comma’, where there should be full stops? My guess is that you have, especially if you are over 45 and went to a good school: one at which you were well punctuated. I learned that the passive verb ‘to be punctuated’ could be used of a person as well as of a sentence in this magazine last week: Julie Burchill mentioned that her husband was a keen grammarian: ‘Once he punctuates one, one stays punctuated.’ Well, I wish Daniel Raven would come and punctuate the breathless texters of 2015. Those commas are pathetically weak: as weak as inflatable plastic fences where sturdy brick walls between sentences should be.

What is the psychology behind the increasing use of the weak comma among the under-45s? I think it is simply a fear of the full stop. The full stop sounds (to the unpunctuated) too scarily abrupt and final. The full stop announces, ‘I have just asserted something’ — even if that something is as harmless as ‘Jamie had a great time with you all.’ It feels safer to shroud one’s remark in a gentle, liberal, unassertive comma, so no one can pin you down to being accountable for having actually made a statement.

‘Sorry, been on the road all morning taking Thomas to the orthodontist, manic end of hols, really kind invitation though, he’d love to join in, what time would you like him?’ Perhaps another reason for the endless succession of commas in such a missive is that it broadcasts the life of a conspicuously multi-tasking parent, doing a thousand things at once, juggling orthodontist, plumber coming, other phone ringing, plus the hectic social lives of the children. There’s simply no time for full stops, they take too long, the voice has to go down, better just use a comma, on to the next thing, oh, that’s the Majestic wine delivery man, need to collect Emily from swimming, thanks for your help… .

The dot-dot-dot ending of paragraphs (see above) is another full-stop-avoiding technique: the fade-out rather than the sudden ending. ‘And Emily’s friends aren’t always reliable…!’ The dot-dot-dot implies, ‘There’s much more that could qualify what I’ve just said, so don’t challenge me on the absoluteness of the bare remark I’ve just made.’ Like the weak comma, the dot-dot-dot seems (to the unpunctuated) to be a softer and safer landing: a landing on cotton wool. It, too, drives me mad.

Even signs, whose whole purpose is to be assertive, run scared. ‘Do not lock bikes against tree-guards, bikes will be removed.’ ‘In fire emergency do not use elevator, use exit stairs.’ Semicolons were aching, pining, begging to be used in those cases. Just imagine how weak the first sentence of The Go-Between would be if L.P. Hartley had written, ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ Luckily, he was punctuated and used a colon.

I’m afraid Shakespeare, though, could be accused of using a weak comma in ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’. In the Second Quarto (1604) it’s a comma; in the First Folio (1623) it’s a comma; but in some of the 20th-century editions of Shakespeare I’ve got at home it has been changed to a dash (‘To be, or not to be — that is the question’) or (in my Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) a colon. Someone, somewhere, has decided to pick Shakespeare up on his weak comma. But no one seems to have tampered with ‘The King is dead, long live the king’. Perhaps those commas are poetic licence. But they sometimes keep me awake at night.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9420432/how-to-stop-being-scared-of-full-stops/feed/23164496265featuredGalwayhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9420322/on-the-yeats-trail-in-galway/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9420322/on-the-yeats-trail-in-galway/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9420322The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free Wi-Fi if you want it, but it would be criminal… Read more

]]>The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free Wi-Fi if you want it, but it would be criminal to do anything other than gawp at the view. Two and a half hours pass quickly when you are travelling at sunset, passing between rain clouds with rainbows falling out of the sky.

While my trip was, as they say, for ‘the craic’ (a good friend’s 40th), I couldn’t come to Galway without making time for a W.B. Yeats pilgrimage. His patron Lady Augusta Gregory had her home near Gort, in the south of the county: Galway is saturated in his poetry; or perhaps I mean his poetry is saturated in Galway. But in the county today, there is both chaotic reverence and wilful disregard.

Lady Gregory gives her name to the ‘hotel and conference centre’ where I stayed, but her house, Coole Park — a refuge for Yeats over more than 20 years — was demolished in 1941. In what was her walled garden, children whizz around on scooters, and dogs run off the leash around the ‘Autograph Tree’ where Bernard Shaw, Augustus John and friends carved their initials. The steps to the sunken garden lead nowhere.

Roy Foster’s biography provides some piquant details about the relationship between patron and prized pet. Lady Gregory would not let Yeats socialise with other house guests until he’d written six lines of poetry that day. Her son and heir, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not amused to have this handsome poet hanging around: he once suggested that Yeats might perhaps like to provide his own decanter and wine for his summer holidays.

Though at six lines a day it must have taken a while to come, the landscape and his hostess now have a fame that has outlived the house; most notably in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. (The swans, at least, are still there.) In the poem, the older Yeats — perhaps in deference to his hostess — grieves for the carefree young man who first came to Coole 19 years before. The young man was in fact far from carefree: at that point he had been driven almost mad by Maud Gonne, though he was still a dazzling house-guest.

Just a few miles away my taxi driver dropped me at Thoor Ballylee. This Norman tower, which Yeats bought from Lady Gregory for a nominal sum in about 1917, has survived slightly better than Coole — it’s still standing, anyway. And the poet was expecting time to do its work — a plaque reads:

I, the poet, William Yeats
With old mill boards and sea-green slates
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George,
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.

Even though the tower is locked up, there’s something electric about being able to see the poet’s view, virtually unchanged since his time. Most striking of all is the speed and noise of the river. The ‘gong-tormented sea’ is still rushing past his window.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/classified-features/9420322/on-the-yeats-trail-in-galway/feed/2classfeaturedLet there be lighthttp://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9416462/how-to-save-islam-from-the-islamists/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9416462/how-to-save-islam-from-the-islamists/#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 04:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=9416462The terror attack in Paris last week represents Islamism’s most explicit declaration of war on free society. Non-Muslims were slaughtered in a non-Muslim country to avenge a so-called crime against… Read more

]]>The terror attack in Paris last week represents Islamism’s most explicit declaration of war on free society. Non-Muslims were slaughtered in a non-Muslim country to avenge a so-called crime against a blasphemy law that is not even Islamic — but merely Islamist. If there’s any blasphemy here, it’s that of Islamism itself against my religion, Islam.

At last, on New Year’s Day, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, did what no other leader of the Muslim world has done to date: he named Islam’s real enemy. In a gathering of religious clerics at Cairo’s ancient Al Azhar University, he called for the rescue of Islam from ‘ideology’. His speech was given little coverage in the western press, but it is worth repeating at some length.

‘We are in need of a religious revolution,’ he said. ‘You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands.’ It is inconceivable, he said, that ‘this thinking — and I am not saying religion — should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.’ The remedy, said al-Sisi, was for Islam to recognise and talk about its mutant strain. ‘Religious discourse is the greatest battle and challenge facing the Egyptian people,’ he said. ‘We need a modern, comprehensive understanding of the religion of Islam,’ rather than ‘relying on a discourse that has not changed for 800 years’.

Sisi’s speech is significant because the Islamic world has precious little record of leaders discussing Muslims’ collective responsibility for the toxic ideologies within our midst. President Sisi’s candour has shone light upon the most critical issue of our time: the urgent need for the Muslim world to denounce Islamism as the imposter and explain the real meaning of the Quran.

I’m a British Muslim who has lived in Saudi Arabia and worked as a doctor in Pakistan — and I have seen how any discussion about Islam is increasingly dangerous in these places. In nations gripped by Islamist ideology, it’s deemed ‘Islamophobic’ to be critical of Islam in any way. Even in the West, critical discussion is becoming difficult. The United Nations has passed several resolutions giving Islamophobia the status of a crime under international law.

So it’s not enough simply to say, as so many did last week, that the Islamists will never win. In several important arenas, they are winning already. Their idea of blasphemy is particularly potent: Shahbaz Bhatti, a Pakistani government minister, was executed by Muslim ‘defenders of the faith’ after his brave criticism of Pakistan’s inhumane (and explicitly Islamist) blasphemy laws. The governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was assassinated on the same grounds. The French journalists were killed to establish a de facto blasphemy law in Europe by sending out a message: if you publish certain cartoons, you put your life — and that of your staff — at risk.

The jihadists’ other objective, of course, is to speak for the Muslim world and advance the idea of a clash of civilisations. This is going fairly well, if opinion polls are to be believed — more or less half of those in Britain, Spain, France and the United States say they believe that Islam is not compatible with the West. And this is why Muslims cannot rely on presidents and prime ministers to denounce terrorism — the public will be persuaded not by what political leaders say, but what we Muslims say.

To assert that this Islamism is un-Islamic is not a kneejerk response to its atrocities but the only conclusion that can be drawn after serious consideration of its principles. The Damascene Muslim scholar, Bassam Tibi, identifies six tenets of Islamism. The first is seeking a new world order through a new dictatorial global ‘caliphate’. (It matters little that the word ‘dawla’ — Islam as state — appears nowhere in the 80,000-word document that we accept as the revealed Quran.) Next is the establishment of Islamism within democracies — Islamists are keen to stand for election, but once they get into power they want to shut the democratic gate behind them.

The third principle is positioning Jews as Islam’s chief enemy, thereby making anti-Semitism central (as Hamas’s founding charter attests). Then comes the perversion of classical jihad into terrorist jihadism — with which the world has become all too familiar.

The fifth tenet is sharia law — not sharia as described by the Quran, but a concocted version used to impose a form of totalitarian rule which is without historical precedent. As we see, particularly in Iran and Pakistan, mercy has no place within Islamists’ version of sharia.

In his searing study of the subject, the British lawyer Sadakat Kadri makes the critical observation that ‘pitiless punishment’, while lacking in Islam itself, has found a comfortable home in much of the Islamist world. Judges have been ‘required to punish but forbidden to forgive’, meaning stonings, amputations and floggings. Medieval barbarity has become a modern-day reality across much of the modern Muslim world — except that such punishment was unusual even in medieval times. Kadri notes that in five centuries of documented Ottoman legal history, there is only one record of a stoning to death.

When they are not exacting pitiless punishment, Islamists are busy with the sixth tenet: their concept of purity and authenticity. Any challenge to Islamism is, to them, de facto evidence of an un-Islamic behaviour. As Professor Tibi puts it, this is what makes Islamism ‘a totalitarian ideology poised to create a totalitarian state’ on a par with Nazism and Leninism. ‘Given that Muslims constitute more than a quarter of humanity,’ he concludes, the tension ‘between civil Islam and Islamist totalitarianism matters to everyone’.

This tension has been building for years. It has broken out into war in Pakistan, as I saw for myself while travelling with the rangers of the Frontier Corps in Waziristan. I saw Pakistani Muslims — civilians and military — de-radicalise and rehabilitate former child jihadists who had been indoctrinated with Taleban ideology. Pakistani soldiers had no trouble understanding the concept of a jihadist or accepting that the Taleban’s creed is a heresy of our great faith. I saw children greet the military convoy, knowing who had pushed back their Islamist oppressors.

Last month’s massacre of 132 children in Peshwar was a shocking reminder to the Muslim world that Islamism is not just directed at westerners. It’s also a reminder of why the animus against Islamism is rising — holding out the prospect of real reform. The Muslim Brotherhood’s hold on Egypt did not last long, and the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq is giving the whole region a growing sense of what unbridled Islamism actually looks like. Crucially, the jihadis are losing the argument. Ten years ago, a Pew poll found that 41 per cent of Pakistani Muslims said that suicide bombings were sometimes justified. Now, it’s down to 3 per cent.

This is what President Sisi was getting at: this is the moment for the Islamic world to expose Islamism — but loosening its hold upon our faith falls upon those Muslims who value pluralism and pursue a civilised, enlightened Islam. The reformation many are calling for isn’t needed of Islam, but rather of Muslims — and specifically of Muslim leadership.

Similarly, western powers can no longer overlook the very major distinctions between authentic Islam and the jihadist imposter. Failing to call Islamism by its name (a failure of which Barack Obama is, alas, guilty) guarantees defeat. The idea of a war between general Islam and the West is exactly the outcome Islamists seek. Failing to name Islamism out of political correctness, fear or stupidity is the ultimate Islamophobic act. What is seen, often sincerely, as a desire not to offend has only allowed Islamists to thrive within our democracies as they plot their extinction.

So we must name the beast, and do so with conviction. This is not just about weeding out a jihadi menace from Birmingham schools, but about giving millions of Muslims the chance for a peaceful coexistence with the rest of humanity. And it’s about persuading non-Muslims that the Islamists are wrong — that such coexistence is possible.

Muslims are reminded by the Quran that to each people is sent ‘a Law’ and ‘a Way’ and that Muslims should not judge people of other faiths in the light of their own. Instead, the People of the Book must judge themselves by their own revealed texts (‘unto you your religion, and unto me my religion’) as we worship the same God. The Quran teaches that Moses and Aaron are to be revered for their courage in the face of merciless rule. The Torah and the Gospel are to be honoured.

And it is a biblical exhortation — let there be light! — that sums up what President Sisi was saying in Cairo, and what many Muslim reformers are saying now. From the Pakistani badlands to the banlieues of Paris, notice must be served to the Islamists: Muslims — that is to say, real Muslims — are coming for you.

]]>The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. And, of course, it is what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris last week.

All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

If politicians are so worried about this secondary ‘backlash’ problem then they would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists’ actions on our peaceful compatriots and then deal with the primary problem — radical Islam — in order that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.

Yet today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect. Because the truth is there for all to see. To claim that people who punish people by killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting ‘Allah is greatest’ has ‘nothing to do with Islam’ is madness. Because the violence of the Islamists is, truthfully, only to do with Islam: the worst version of Islam, certainly, but Islam nonetheless.

Last week, a chink was broken in this wall of disinformation when Sajid Javid, the only Muslim-born member of the British cabinet, and one of its brightest hopes, dipped a toe into this water. After the Paris attacks, he told the BBC: ‘The lazy answer would be to say that this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or Muslims and that should be the end of that. That would be lazy and wrong.’ Sadly, he proceeded to utter the second most lazy thing one can say: ‘These people are using Islam, taking a peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities.’

Here we land at the centre of the problem — a centre we have spent the last decade and a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is especially not. It is certainly not, as some ill-informed people say, solely a religion of war. There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which — luckily for us — most Muslims live by. But it is by no means only a religion of peace.

I say this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts. Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging whole populations to take against all of Islam and abandon all those Muslims who are trying desperately to modernise, reform and de-literalise their faith. And — most importantly — we will give up our own traditions of free speech and historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in the free marketplace of ideas.

It is not surprising that politicians have tried to avoid this debate by spinning a lie. The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus. But he did not and an increasing number of people — Muslim and non-Muslim — have been able to learn this for themselves in recent years. But the light of modern critical inquiry which has begun to fall on Islam is a process which is already proving incredibly painful.

The ‘cartoon wars’ — which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a set of cartoons in 2005 — are part of that. But as Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him this week, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people like the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, ‘I wish we had addressed all this nine years ago.’

Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers were not lunatics without motive, but highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws in 21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology — perverted or plausible though it may be — you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why — whether in Mumbai or Paris — the Islamists always target the Jews.

Of course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights. There seems, as Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair, The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course the more diverse the society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be. It is not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking. The result is that, in contemporary Europe, Islam receives not an undue amount of criticism but a free ride which is unfair to all other religions. The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to ‘de-radicalise’ extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.

There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the ‘Prophet’ and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this ‘offensive’ fact left out.

I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand. Again, that’s in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven’t made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don’t see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts.

We may all share a wish that these traditions were not there but they are and they look set to have serious consequences for us all. We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to ‘turn the other cheek’, Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to ‘slay’ non–believers and chop off their heads?

This is a problem with Islam — one that Muslims are going to have to work through. They could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking verses. Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim. But there isn’t much hope of this happening. Last month, al-Azhar University in Cairo declared that although Isis members are terrorists they cannot be described as heretics.

We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.